Comment by kulahan
19 hours ago
I'm glad computers came in and saved you from your otherwise-inevitable life of cartel involvement, but I don't see what this has to do with the en-masse mental poisoning of children? I'm not even talking about politics yet. Cyber-bullying is insane.
Either way, I genuinely don't believe "let's just hope parents... start doing better?" is a solution.
Parents do need to do better.
Work on building self confidence.
My family relentlessly called me stupid and lazy to the point where a cyberbully would of been an upgrade.
You can always turn your phone off.
A lot of God awful parents treat their kids like trash and blame everyone else when Timmy doesn't get into Harvard.
Of all the people I've met with rough upbringings not a single one blamed anything outside of bad parenting.
Being a parent ( especially a step parent) is extremely hard.
100 years ago bad parents blamed dime novels.
50 years ago it was rock music.
I am not sure I understand the simultaneous arguments that being a parent is very hard AND that parents should just do better and help isn’t needed AND this problem has been going on for over a hundred years (it hasn’t - this is the first time we’ve ever had a generation actually turn out dumber).
Could you clarify that, and maybe take into account the fact that this is indeed completely unprecedented?
If you have time, I also would love to hear how “parents should do better” fits into a plan where parents DO do better.
Bad parents are always gonna find an excuse. Honest to God when I think of my childhood if people would’ve just left me alone for 30 minutes, I would’ve had a much easier time.
Turns out you don’t need to get into a great college to make a lot of money. If anything, my screwing around all day with video games has probably led to my great 6 figure career.
There’s absolutely no way to implement age gates all over the internet without fundamentally locking it down. Do you want a future where a website that chronicles the history of slave revolts is denied an operating permit?
This is about controlling the free speech of adults, not anything else.
We need to calibrate the incentives. Parents can be held accountable for neglect and abuse. Giving your kids phones and letting them use it without supervision is abuse. Enforce it. Denormalize this bullshit.
I have knives in my kitchen. Do I give it to them and let them run around the neighborhood? I could but there are consequences and I would be held accountable for it.
Social media = knives or as some other commenter pointed out, similar to letting your kids play in traffic.
The mere existence of something dangerous is an irrelevant comparison unfortunately. We didn’t invent knives and then immediately see an entire generation get dumber.
You’ll have the burden of needing to explain how any innocuous comparison you make still holds when we’ve never seen that kind of reversal in all of the time we’ve been watching as a society.