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Comment by Sigmoid | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

I personally think one problem with this article is their cult following of science. I guess there isn't conclusive scientific evidence that social media or video games are addictive or detrimental to you. But should I wait possible decades for more conclusive research? I rather not. I know I have been addicted to video games and it has negativity impacted my life.

The reason people are making these 'assumptions' about social media/video games being addictive is because they can see it in their own life and the life of others. The 'hard science' this guy is talking about just hasn't catched up.

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Yet another call to trust personal experiences, stories and subjective opinions as more authoritative than science. It's a bad trend.

Science should be a tool, not be a religion that you MUST trust.

When the voice of the people does not matter anymore because some guy in a white coat said "Science, you know", this is another kind of bad trend.

There are opinions and personal experiences - valid for one or a few people, and then there are scientific concepts that are universal and generalize everywhere. The Mars helicopter flies OK even though it wasn't designed on Mars. Science works with or without people's approval.

My main concern with stories is that they are prone to emotional appeal and cherry picking of facts. We live in the era of fake news and critical justice mobs after all, we need to be skeptic. What if the story proposes an agenda that is just supporting another group against your own, not including a balanced view of the situation? What if the underlying message is that of social war, non-inclusiveness and dehumanizing towards the "oppressor group"? The Bible itself is a story with many many victims during the last two millennia.

I get what you mean.

I agree with you, some scientific concepts -at our state of understanding-, may seem universal and generalize everywhere, such as Einstein's work on relativity that the Mars helicopter must be using.

What I wanted to emphasize is that, humans are deeply political and biased animals, and will always use a scientific concept to their own interests, even ever so slightly. Just look on the horror of the stuff psychiatry has done the past century : accusing women of being frigid if their child was autistic, saying that their genitalia made them prone to psychiatric disorders, the list goes on...

In my opinion, the concept of "addiction" falls into the 2nd category. Humans are just so complex, that we will never isolate the gene of addiction, but nevertheless, this is not a requisite to start saying that junk-food or smartphones can damage your quality of life.

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