I was waiting for a 3rd stimulus. Maybe the complementarity of definedness and empiricism can be the third stimulus? Anyway, after listening to this:
Moral Entrepreneurs, Measurement Issues, & Screentime with Andrew Przybylski https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/decoding-academia-moral-entrepreneurs-measurement-issues-screentime-with-andrew-przybylski-patreon-preview And reading this: Jonathan Haidt Promoted a Fringe Theory on Trans Youth https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs I asked some steadily less sycophantic LLMs to help me understand what's going wrong. To me the most important artificial content they tossed at me was (from Claude): "Advocacy laundered as science. Przybylski and others argue the deeper problem is the posture - Haidt presents a high-confidence causal narrative to policymakers, media, and the public, in a domain where the honest scientific answer is 'the evidence is genuinely mixed and uncertain.'" But what choice do we have? Isn't it *necessary* to dumb down, hyper-partisanize, knead into (false) narrative, in order to get our excluded-middle-broken democracy to do *anything*? If we ascribe (which I think I mostly do) to an interventionist epistemology, we must act in order to understand. No action means no understanding. So, sure, Haidt's imputation of scientific credibility into ROGD is bad, if not an indicator of his underlying reactionary "heterodox" posture. But we can choose to take his other stuff in good faith and suggest that a political action like limiting screen time for youth is an OK exploratory intervention that may lead to a finer grained understanding of their impact in the future. (Yes, given the way law - our law, anyway - works. Once it's written, it's difficult to overturn. But maybe that need not be the case.) The trick is how/whether to consider the would-be counterfactuals. If we implement them, what capabilities/trends will fail to obtain if/when we impose such regulations? Will the kids be less facile with the tech? Less prepared for the future? Less able to self-regulate their responses to the tech? Being a relatively heavy drinker, I often hear the (empirically unjustified) claims from my fellow drinkers that many places in Eurpoe allow youth to drink, thereby providing them with resiliency and a better immune system for alcoholism. I think their claims are flat out false ... despite my desire to believe it. I'm worried I have a similar bias, here. Let the kids have all the "screens" they want. Who are we to prescribe such things? Same goes with AI. So while its arrogant to regulate, it's also arrogant to not regulate until "all the data's in". [sigh] -- ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω. .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
