Agreed. And the point about social pressure is crucial, I think. Renee's
granddaughter is visiting. She decided to look for my criminal record on the
internet, which I enthusiastically encouraged. She found all the details you
might expect data brokers to sell. (She didn't find my criminal record,
luckily.) But it was a fantastic foil for talking about the difference between
one's persona versus one's living self.
The kids these days share WAY more information than the old farts can imagine. Their networks are
huge, *uncountable* I'd argue ... maybe "uncountable". (IDK how to use words anymore.)
Social pressure is different, not merely in degree. E.g. QAA humanized [this
guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrick_Brennan) in a [recent
podcast](https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/the-life-of-fredrick-brennan). I admit I would never
have done that, despite my apparent willingness to explore some pretty dark corners of the world.
Some stuff just grosses me out. But we need spelunkers to crawl around in those dark places to help
us circumscribe pustulant caverns like 8chan and 4chan, to understand "social pressure"
given our new landscape of phenomena like the manosphere, etc.
In that context, Haidt et al seem so childlike, so innocent in their pure ivory tower. I
get that same feeling of innocence when Nick uses the word _troll_ ... ["We have
such sights to show you!"](https://youtu.be/lKfupO4ZzPs?si=FRIoMdhzTs6GJHPB)
On 3/30/26 9:55 PM, Prof David West wrote:
re: kids drinking in Europe. Alcoholism , the disease, is only marginally less
prevalent in Europe than the US and has nothing to do with early social
drinking. What is easily demonstrated: teens exhibit almost none of the binge
drinking that is so obvious here. When they are home. Take a teen from Spain to
Amsterdam and they would be pretty much indistinguishable from an American
teen. The two summers I took students from New Mexico to Spain and they could
legally drink, the majority got fall down drunk the first night out but never
afterward because of the social pressure of their Spanish peers. My anecdotal
evidence is supported by multiple ethnographic studies.
davew
On Mon, Mar 30, 2026, at 8:31 AM, glen wrote:
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]
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