I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these ‘evils’ to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I’ve seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with “loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital.”

I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.

It’s a complicated subject, as all of the other ‘evils’ have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I’ve personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn’t start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.

probably not, in the same way that your grandma calls a video chat a facetime or your representative might call the internet a series of tubes

AI is the default word for any kind of machine magic now

Great read! Thank you

Any information humanity has ever preserved in any format is worthless

It’s like this person only just discovered science, lol. Has this person never realized that bias is a thing? There’s a reason we learn to cite our sources, because people need the context of what bias is being shown. Entire civilizations have been erased by people who conquered them, do you really think they didn’t re-write the history of who these people are? Has this person never followed scientific advancement, where people test and validate that results can be reproduced?

Humans are absolutely gonna human. The author is right to realize that a single source holds a lot less factual accuracy than many sources, but it’s catastrophizing to call it worthless and it ignores how additional information can add to or detract from a particular claim- so long as we examine the biases present in the creation of said information resources.

Cheers for this, found two games that seem interesting that I never heard about before!