Is the addictiveness of social media great? No. But the blame shouldn't be placed squarely on the companies either. What happened to personal responsibility? I was addicted to Facebook, I realized it, and I disconnected from it. I had withdrawals for a while (pulling out my phone and trying to open the app I had deleted without really thinking about what I was doing) but I quit. I know I am addicted to YouTube shorts, so I stay away from them. Occasionally I'll go on a bender and a few hours will slip by without me realizing, but while I know YouTube is designing them to be addictive, I blame myself for falling for it.
There are plenty of things in life that can be addicting; drugs, sex, money, power, adrenaline, entertainment, technology... The list goes on. If we remove everything addicting from life, you better believe something else will rise up to take its place.
The solution therefore isn't to remove everything addicting from life, but rather to raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop.
Personal responsibility is important. But at the same time, we don't let people open up a heroin shop and then claim it's your personal responsibility to not buy it and use it. We don't put slot machines in schools but tell kids that they need self-control to not get addicted to gambling.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
Maybe this applies more towards adults, but I don't think the correct answer for kids is only "just have self-control," something kids are notorious for not having. Certainly there's a lot of parental responsibility here but we can simultaneously hold companies responsible for their part too.
This. Also, technology is ever changing, and expecting parents to constantly keep up with feature rollouts on these platforms is unrealistic.
Personal responsibility IS important, but we also don't allow cigarette companies to advertise on billboards with cute characters (remember Joe Camel?)
The problem is that internal communications inside these companies raised concerns about the manipulativeness, and even deceptiveness of the algorithms and tactics they were using.
They weren't just consciously creating an attractive platform, they were consciously creating a manipulative platform.
It seems though, increasingly, that the ability to avoid addiction is less about pulling one up by one’s own bootstraps, and in many ways determined more by genetics. That is to say, what might have been possible for you is much harder for others.
Look no further than GLP-1. People who have struggled for years - decades - with overeating are almost immediately able to cut back on addictive eating. It’s not that they suddenly discovered willpower. It’s a biochemical effect.
It’s no wonder then that kids are more susceptible to addictive building behaviors. Their minds are pliable and teachable.
Why would we not legislate things that take advantage of that?
If they are liable of making the thing addictive, it does mean it is their fault. In this case, it specifically says it's designed to be addictive to children, whose personal responsibility is probably not expected.
Don't blame yourself! You had an encounter in the world and were greatly affected. Anyone who had the same predisposition and same exposure as you would of fallen in the same situation, just as they would have pulled themselves out of it the same way.
It is not, like, a moral thing to become addicted to something. And the ability to pull yourself out of it is determined, whether you are conscious of it or not, by your broader circumstances and by the same predispositions that brought you there in the first place. At the end of the day we are all fucked up animals reeling from the ongoing consequences of prematurational helplessness..
We should feel together in our problems like this, not distinguish ourselves by how we might individually overcome them. You are not "better" finding yourself standing over a beggar addict, you are lucky, never forget that. If for no other reason that it's not a sustainable world view otherwise, it leads to insecurity, anger, and relapse.
The dark truth of the world is that everyone is doing the best they can. How could they not? Why would they not? What is this thing that separates you from the addict or murderer? Unless you have maybe some spiritual convictions, I can't imagine what it is..
Just really, I know you had a powerful personal journey, but don't let it establish to you that we are all fundamentally alone, because we are not, and its good to help people who maybe need more help.
On the other, it's very different when companies explicitly design their products to be as addictive as possible.
We've been through this with Big Tobacco already. Nicotine and other tobacco substances are addictive on their own, but tobacco companies were prosecuted for deliberately making cigarettes as addictive as possible, besides also marketing to children. The parallels with Big Tech and social media are undeniable.
In emergency departments, Black patients are prescribed opioids for acute pain at a lower rate than White patients with matched chief concerns.4
Discrepancies in prescriptions for chronic pain therapies have also been identified in Veterans Administration and Medicaid payer databases, and several retrospective cohort studies have shown persistent underprescribing of analgesics to Black patients.6,7
White medical trainees, reflecting the general population, can have false beliefs about biologic differences between Black and White patients (eg, “Black patients feel less pain”), and this racial bias leads to inaccurate pain diagnoses and treatment recommendations.8
In anesthesiology and pain medicine, use of regional anesthesia for joint replacement surgery is applied less frequently in Black patients and the underinsured.9
This also holds true in the implantation of spinal cord stimulation for the treatment of postlaminectomy syndrome.10
Among patients with occupational low back injuries, Black patients incur lower treatment costs than their White counterparts and are provided fewer health care interventions, including surgery.11
Perceived discrimination results in psychological distress, and a US population–based study has demonstrated a dose-response relationship between psychological distress and chronic pain.
> White medical trainees, reflecting the general population, can have false beliefs about biologic differences between Black and White patients (eg, “Black patients feel less pain”), and this racial bias leads to inaccurate pain diagnoses and treatment recommendations.8
IMO, it's a little unfair to ascribe deliberate, knowing application of racist stereotypes. That kind of rhetoric by researchers can have unintended consequences, however well-intentioned, such as with the overcorrection wrt opioids, and is often used by interest groups to change policy in directions not otherwise warranted by well-founded evidence. (It's sometimes like people using "think of the children" as a way to stream roll more nuanced, narrowly focused debate.) There is material evidence that, broadly speaking, different ethnicities have different skin characteristics, including thickness (which is admittedly often used in an imprecise manner, but can defensibly include characteristics like elasticity). It figures prominently into aging, and generally considered part of the reason why "whites" (for lack of more precise categorization) tend to wrinkle more with age, particularly relative to Asians with similar skin tone. (Contra stereotypes, some research shows Asians have "thicker" skin than whites and blacks, at least in the sense of being less prone to wrinkle for similar phenotypic pigmentation.) Papers that make the claim of prima facie racism like https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abs... say in the abstract the beliefs are unfounded, but in the full article only go so far as to admit the evidence is equivocal or that doctors draw unnecessary or unsupported implications.[1]
Nonetheless, it's fair to say non-specialists shouldn't be making treatment decisions based on such poor and otherwise collateral evidence. And I would agree the evidence for racially disparate pain management treatment generally is very compelling, just that the racism is more implicit and unconscious. All race-based distinguishers are highly suspect, IMO, even when they accurately reflect a group in context. But unless and until medical systems comprehensively adopt personalized genetic profiling (given various limitations in cost, time, and well-researched data, something still pretty far off for general medicine), doctors are kind of stuck wrestling with old epidemiologic classifiers.
[1] The abstract says, "Although race is a social construct, the biomedical sciences—including dermatological science—have been used to promote the false idea that race has a biological basis. The study of race-based differences in skin thickness is an example." But the full-text says: "Race-based differences in skin thickness remain an active area of investigation. A review of the literature (1977-2014) reporting differences in aging skin across race and/or ethnicity noted that Asian and Black skin had 'thicker and more compact dermis' than White skin, 'with the thickness being proportional to the degree of pigmentation."4 A 2022 meta-analysis of 133 studies concluded that any difference in epidermal thickness in healthy human skin was minor, calling into question the usefulness of distinguishing skin thickness among racial groups.5" Note that this summation is putting a gloss onto research that is itself equivocal, but then is cited in policy debates to make claims about what "the science" unequivocally says.
The original claim isn’t that trainees are deliberately applying racist stereotypes. The study (Hoffman et al., 2016) found that people who endorsed false biological beliefs about race made less accurate pain assessments and worse treatment recommendations. That’s a finding about cognitive bias, not about conscious malice. So the pushback here is against a reading the source doesn’t really support.
The detour into skin thickness is also a bit beside the point. The cited passage is about pain perception, not dermatology. The fact that there’s equivocal evidence on epidermal thickness doesn’t do much to complicate the finding that believing “Black patients feel less pain” leads to undertreating pain. Those are different claims.
I’d also push back a little on the framing that doctors are “stuck” with blunt epidemiologic classifiers until personalized genomics arrives. The disparity evidence here isn’t about doctors making reasonable inferences from imperfect population-level data. It’s about false beliefs producing worse care. You don’t need a genetic profile to stop believing something that isn’t true. The fix for that is education and awareness, which is considerably more available than whole-genome sequencing.
The point about overcorrection with opioids is fair and worth taking seriously. But “researchers pointing out bias might cause overcorrection” is a reason to be careful about how you design interventions, not a reason to soften the description of the problem itself.
Both of these comments are needlessly snarky. Although it is true that the RSS capability of Thunderbird has been around for quite a while, I enjoy articles that simply reflect the author's discovery or use case.
Like you, I was consuming RSS through Thunderbird around that time as well and thought it was really good. I have since moved to something else(many times) as my needs have changed.
In the spirit of HN, the poster maybe wanted a discussion of how the use of RSS has declined and walled gardens took its place which is not good for the longevity and usefulness of knowledge.
As with everything, I think there is an appropriate middle ground here. There is definitely too much beating around the bush in a lot of professional work, but some of that is actually useful and even good. Context doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. Manners aren't always important, but sometimes they are.
A proper balance of direct and indirect is the appropriate tack to take.
The Egyptian Fry's in Campbell was my local store. Fry's was amazing - you just had to know that the salespeople were on commission and avoid them. I never had one come up to me in line and try to get a commission, but that honestly doesn't surprise me. As a nerd, I would even sometimes go and just help random people there - the salespeople sure didn't help anyone there!
My dad told me a story about his college days; Professor gave everyone a problem to work on over the weekend. He went home and spent hours on it, but couldn't figure it out. Came back to class Monday and everyone else had issues with it as well. Professor walks in: "Sorry everyone, that problem was actually unsolvable."
Yeah, you had to have sufficient rep on Slashdot, then you were randomly allocated a certain number of votes (5 or so, IIRC) that you could use to vote. There were fixed categories you could vote an item for, such as "funny", or "off topic". Once your votes were gone, that was it until you were randomly awarded more. The max score anything could get was 5, and a minimum was -1. You could use the scores to filter what you saw. (ie: show full text of >3 insightful, and summaries of 1-2, hide <1)
It worked pretty well. Obvious trolling was still down voted, and insightful stuff was up voted. The ability to just show a blurb of lower-voted stuff was nice as well; you could ignore obvious crap, but expand it if it caught your attention.
This was good insight. I do think this system would work better. I like the min rep aspect too. The things you've listed would go a long way to preserve the filtration effects of a voting system while possibly mitigating abuse and bot proliferation.
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