The Plot to Poison Children's Minds | Hacker News Reader

The Plot to Poison Children's Minds

paulkrugman.substack.com

24 pointsbhouston28 comments

> What all three of these reversals suggest to me is that the 2024 election wasn’t a victory for populism or actually any kind of “ism.”

anti-incumbentism

EFF still not a fan of KOSA.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/kids-online-safety-act...

>But money got in the way.

Doesn't that happen to every thing ? We could all list attempts at positive change that people who are making money from the item stops the change.

This just in: Politicians are for sale.

How shocking! Surely such things were completely unprecedented before the Jackson administration.

Oh, wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_bargain#Election_of_18...

If only there were some...other object...in the model between the paternalistic government and the child that could offer support and guidance to help children navigate their __init__() process.

To be effective, such an object would have to approach the robustness of a family.

Alas, and to Mr. Krugman's point, the frog$kins got in the way.

But, contra his point, the solution to being off course is not to diverge further from the proper course. Fix families and a host of woes diminish. How? Find your community of faith, and lead a relatively less materialistic life. Those children are a gift on loan from the Creator.

Mad props for the Leslie Feist clip at the end of the post. Underrated genius.

In practice faith/religion etc. fixes the problem on the ground but the problem is that no one buys any of it is real anymore. Many people are willing to ignore this dissonance given the benefits it brings them but most have a hard time.

> no one buys any of it is real anymore.

I submit that everyone has an operating system; the question is how explicit they are about it, with joy being proportional to the degree of explicitness.

Youtube toxicity is real for me. No matter what I downvote, the same kinds of radicalizing videos make their way through. Either the algorithm is broken or people are trying to break it. I’m glad I’m not a kid in 2025.

ProTip: If you turn off "Watch History", it eliminates all of the suggestions from the home page (and as a bonus, it eliminates all of the "Shorts" from your home page, too). All you get is a side menu and a little message in the main content area where Google begs you to turn back on Watch History.

Unfortunately, this does not turn off the suggestions that come with the playing video. Not sure if there is a way to turn them off, but if there is, I'm hoping someone will reply here to demonstrate it.

It's too bad you have to jump through hoops just to avoid toxic, ragebait and other content that YouTube desperately wants you to watch.

Thank you for mentioning the "watch history" setting above. I just turned it off and appreciate you spreading that knowledge. :)

Yeah but then how do you find what to watch next? Some of the most fun I have on YouTube is going down random rabbit holes and discovering new things. How do you do that without recommendations? There’s no way I want to start at the public recommendations/trending page. It’s always terrible.

It seems to me that pruning the watch history (vs just turning it off) has a noticeable effect on the recs.

You might even want to build an AI to optimize your watch history :)

Back when I was actively trying to "steer" my youtube bubble, it seemed like my efforts took a week or two to take effect; maybe suitably pruning watch history could reduce that time constant a bit?

(then there are the paid recommendation slots — those were fairly obvious when I had my bubble over in some other script, but latin-character vids were always pushed in the same placings)

Current side hobby is to see if rec engine will turn up more HN-like channels like this one

https://youtu.be/CepSVdTYXNc

I watch what I subscribe to, and what I search for, and that's it.

The whole point of turning off recommendations and suggestions is to browse the web deliberately, without algorithms pushing things at you. I consider "discovery" to be an anti-feature that I don't want.

How do you find what to subscribe to without recommendations? It’s a genuine question, I’m not trying to be difficult.

a very robust and advanced search… like if I wrote it, it would be like a prompt-based thing

> Youtube toxicity is real for me. No matter what I downvote, the same kinds of radicalizing videos make their way through.

I don't have that problem. I think it is because I subscribed to a bunch of nerd channels and those have more influence that watching a few seconds of a random video in the recommender they have.

lets test this: watch two videos, one from joe rogan, like rogan clips, etc., and one about anything vaguely military, like the history of guns or something.

you will see nothing but jordan peterson, preger u, etc. clips for ~2 weeks in your feed.

at this point i don't even attempt to test the waters or do some sort of good-faith attempt to understand the ideology / hear what they have to say, since it will, immediately and aggressively start spamming me with hard right content for months.

Google is sometimes just baffling with how actions affect recommendations.

Someone I know posted a link on Facebook to a YouTube video of Dave Grohl inviting a kid from the audience onstage to play guitar at a concert. I watched it.

I had no idea who Dave Grohl was. I saw from the video that his band is the Foo Fighters. I have heard of them but I'm never sought out their music or watched any videos of them. I've probably heard them in passing without knowing it. I can't name any songs of theirs and don't even know what genres of music they play. Even after watching that video I don't recognize any of the songs because the song they played with the kid was a cover of a Metallica song.

At this point everyone no doubt expects me to say how my YouTube feed was then full of Dave Grohl and/or Foo Fighter videos.

Nope. Not a one. Nor were there any of the other videos YouTube likes to recommend when they think you might be interested in a particular artist. No videos of people covering the artist on other instruments. No videos of reactors reacting to the artist. No videos analyzing the music theory of their songs. No tutorials on how to play their songs on guitar.

Nothing.

But on Google News for the next month or two pretty much everything in the section where they make recommendations based on your interests was about Dave Grohl. It mostly wasn't even stuff about his music. It was almost all celebrity gossip stuff.

How the heck did my watching a YouTube video end up having such a big influence on the Google New recommendations but have no apparent affect at all on YouTube?

I wonder if it is because I got to the YouTube video from a Facebook link? Maybe Facebook users who follow links to videos about a celebrity have a high probability of being interested in gossip about the celebrity?

I wish YouTube would show me something radicalizing. I mostly get cooking and woodworking recommendations.

Maybe I'm not interacting with it correctly. Do you watch all or most of a video then downvote to get more content like that?

Just go on X. I created new account that only follows Video Gaming accounts and the amount of disturbing crap X has shown me this past month has got me straight up scared to scroll.

I have no clue why people think Elon firing everyone at twitter was a success.

It is actually worth ingesting some toxic content just to really see what people are being influenced by. It hurts because they do branch off of tiny truths here and there... before veering off into whacko-town

I think I’ll try to close any offending vids as quickly as I can going forward and not downvoting. I suspect the YT algorithm sees me watching the first few seconds in shock as “engagement.”

Clean your watch history or create a new account. Youtube algorithm is very good, just watch / like videos you want more in recommendations, use private tabs for everything else.

Twitter algorithm is much worse for example and has bugs, you'll need to grind for some time to get rid of popular trash and politics. Any engagement with bad content will only bring you more of it in the feed, and there's tons of baits to engage with something stupid. So mute any accounts and words you don't like, click "not interested" on posts, but it's really slow to update.

I hope everyone knows that "think of the children" is code for "I have a fact-free moral argument." I expect no better from Krugman while speaking outside his expertise (economics). He later devolves into "Trump, Trump, Trump," invoking the boogeyman as if that wins arguments outside of liberal circles.

> Alcohol can be a source of pleasure, especially in a social context.

"Especially?" Citation needed.

> we also as a nation realized that young people shouldn’t be trusted to make that decision. Most states established a minimum legal drinking age of 21. In the 1970s

That's because funding for a state's highways was tied to its compliance with a 21 drinking age.

Krugman panders to his audience. He'll nutpick/misrepresent/strawman some other side just to make the people who already agree with him feel good.

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