Comment by ZoomerCretin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZoomerCretin | Hacker News Reader

Being friendless has a higher negative impact on lifespan than smoking. It's not a big stretch to link phone use to the huge increase in depression, anxiety, and poor social skills. And just like smoking, phone use in public isn't limited to the person using it. You can't exactly have a conversation with someone who is on their phone. I find myself pulling my phone out whenever my companions also do so.

If this seems a bit heavy-handed, it's because damaging and addictive habits require collective action to stop. No one walks down the street in San Francisco and tries to convince heroin addicts to stop for other peoples' good. No one tries to tell drunks and alcoholics to stop overdoing it.

They are definitely early, and possibly the first place to do this, but they will surely not be the last. Our youth have been ruined by cheap, omnipresent, and never ending social media content. This is a step in the right direction to make public spaces social again.

Strangers out on the street are largely out doing something or going somewhere and are unlikely to want to strike up a conversation.

People who are friendless ought to get a job, volunteer, get a hobby, join a group, go to a social space instead of expecting strangers to entertain them.

Yeah, God forfend people should act human to one another, right?

You aren't entitled to other people's time. You should try to earn it by doing something together with people that both enjoy. I volunteer at a cat shelter for instance. Feed some cats, play with the kittens then shoot the shit with the other volunteers.

I never understand where it comes from, this idea that an unplanned social interaction in public necessarily constitutes one person choosing to waste the time of others, or that no one ever has any choice but to let an unwelcome interaction persist indefinitely. It gives the impression of a somewhat socially impoverished style of life, but I assume that's no more accurate a perspective than anyone else's.

I think this opinion differs both geographically and generationally. Uban/young/northern people are less apt to want to socialize with strangers. Neither preference is inherently wrong I tend to think the strangers you are discussing know better than you what is or isn't a waste of their own time.

For practical purposes most folks just aren't apt to have anything useful to contribute in 3 minutes. I'm 43 and I don't think I have EVER got anything useful out of such an interaction. It's just pure social petting like monkey's picking bugs off one another and I don't get anything out of it nor feel obligated to do it when walking around. I don't feel socially impoverished because I have actual social interactions in contexts which I feel are useful or beneficial.

My theory is the people that have more need of such social petting are aggrieved at changing social standards. It's just not my problem.

"Like monkeys picking bugs off one another" is a hell of a thing for a hominin to say. I take your point about geography and generational change, and I don't think you're wrong, but I'm also not at all convinced this is a healthy habit for a species remarkably social even among primates.

Social grooming is great for group cohesion. But that's others you know, not total strangers. Monkeys don't have to constantly deal with strangers.

Last I checked at least, monkeys also don't build cities.

You can learn how to build a city. You can't learn how to build acquaintances with everyone in that city.

I'm not sure how to address the idea that prior acquaintance is a requirement for speaking to anyone, or being spoken to.

I remain unconvinced this is other than an impoverished way of looking at the world. If anything, it seems much more to me now also a self-impoverishing one.

That's not the claim, the claim is that "prior acquaintance" is a pretty big part of social grooming.

I'm just saying to be slow to use monkey habits as a reference when critical pieces are so different. I'm not particularly arguing about what humans should do. Merely pointing out that the human situation is more unique than previously implied.

I didn't introduce the figure, only riffed on it to try to make my point more clear. If it's become a distraction, we should indeed discard it. That said, unique or no, I don't think a situation in which no one is willing to speak to or be spoken to by anyone they don't recognize is one that's especially ordinary for this species either. Certainly it has been anything but in my lifetime, and not only for happening to grow up in a place that wasn't Boston or Seattle.

One of the things I've loved about Baltimore for the quarter century I've lived here has been exactly that it differed in this, but lately that hasn't seemed very much to be the case, and that bothers me, especially to see happen in such a relatively short time.

I'm not inclined to haste in accepting it as normal, especially in the wake of a pandemic that seems to have significantly accelerated a process of cultural disintegration in at least the US. Things were not like this at all five years ago, and it legitimately frightens me that people seem to struggle to remember that, because it means I have to wonder what else may have come to be thought normal five years hence.

If I go to a cat shelter it's to help cats and interact with cats, how dare you steal that time from me with your simiesque jibberjabber!

There's nothing specific to any context† that would let presuppose that anyone's up for socialisation. The only thing in common is that two people have volunteered to feed cats. It is just as much a commonality as me noticing someone in a bus or park reading a book and saying "hey I've been meaning to read that one, WDYT of it so far?".

The only way to know, is... to address the person, thereby taking a risk at either robbing them of a bit of time, or - $deity forbid - meeting someone nice, if for a fleeting moment. They are of course at liberty to turn the attempt down, a perfectly valid response that should be treated with utmost respect.

† well, except things like parties or blind dates.

It puts you in the same space at a time when your attention isn't fully engaged by other matters nor the task at hand with the same person for hours every week.

Furthermore at least some conversation is apt to be started for functional reasons.

This creates the space, opportunity, and time for meaningful conversation and interaction. Contrast this to standing in line for food together for 2 minutes with someone you aren't apt to ever meet again.

"Our youth have been ruined..."

I don't get where this hyperbole comes from. Wasn't every generation "ruined" by this, that or the other thing? We need to maintain some perspective. The youth are the more relevant ones here, not us.

I would note that friendship has never been defined by the casual and vapid interactions at the grocery store. My longest lasting friendships have been ones I formed on irc 30 years ago and still go on, despite only rarely speaking face to face.

People who don’t understand something that didn’t exist when they grew up assume it must not be possible. People assume that games crush creativity, that social interaction online is not actually social interaction. These same biases based on “the way we did it” show up in the RTO debate and other areas of society that are being changed with a new mode of interactions.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable, and I don’t think for one second that online interactions are necessarily worse. I do think we are going through a transient period where as a society we adjust, and transient periods are rough. But as we learn to exist with these new modes of living we, as a social whole, will simply adapt how we interact and live, create new social rules about how to best exist with these new tools.

As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different.

Hand wringing and bans and teeth gnashing will happen, won’t help, and won’t alter the course of a single thing. Better, IMO, to lean into learning how to live with these advances in a healthy way and teach your children that. Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids.

> As we did with language, written words, books, newspapers, telegraphs, radio, telephones, television, etc. Every one of these was greeted with fear and disdain, and social disruption as we settled through a period of transformation. This one is no different.

My position doesn't come from resistance to change. It comes from seeing statistics like this: https://nypost.com/2023/06/19/number-of-teens-who-dont-enjoy... and from seeing how social interactions in person have degraded as smartphones became pervasive.

>Banning them from learning the complexities of a new social medium until they’re old enough to get into serious trouble will only hurt your kids.

And yet this is exactly what we do with alcohol. You cannot buy or consume any until the age of 21. Do you think we should simply trust children to self-moderate alcohol consumption?

If your world view is formed by an article in the New York Post, and doesn’t even start to account for correlation vs causation, I don’t really know what to tell you.

And yes, we should trust people to learn self moderation for alcohol. It works very well across most of Europe. Puritans should be fucked off at every opportunity.

This is my point about transient periods. What makes us believe that this trend is more than social adjustment to major change? That as a society we don’t have good social coping mechanisms for the new modes of communication and that over time we will adjust as we adjusted to all other disruptive changes?

I don’t think children are, by and large, heavy drinkers regardless. These laws are more rooted in prohibition and Puritanism than science. Society prior to age laws didn’t collapse, and alcohol was available to children for at least ten thousand of years. In fact America generally has significantly worse problems with destructive alcoholism than the rest of the world, where the relationship with alcohol isn’t as obsessively restrictive.

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