Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly | Hacker News Reader

Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly

economist.com

351 pointsjohntfella398 comments

My dad used to tie up the Ethernet cable on our family's home router and hide it in a closet. The knots were to prevent us from reconnecting the router and putting it back before he got back home. He'd be able to tell if we tried since he was the only one able to tie that special knot :)

All to prevent my siblings and I from wasting our summers on Runescape or Miniclip or something. Looking back, the hours we were playing each day is nothing compared to the hours he spends scrolling through crap these days. My dad worked in such an intellectually stimulating job before, so it's baffling to see that he chooses to do this all day. I imagine most older parents are in the same boat these days. It has made me hate social media, YouTube, short videos, et al. even more

This special knot prevented the cable from transmitting a signal?

it's like a seal to show that they had disobeyed.

I'm not OP but presumably the knot made it so that the cable wasn't long enough to reach the computer.

> and hide it in a closet

Yep, exactly. You couldn't reach the computer unless you undid the knot.

It makes it shorter.

Obligatory reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot

Maybe the intellectually stimulating job made him more predisposed to needing the constant dopamine drip of the screen.

I guess a trip to RadioShack for a cable of your own was out of the question, eh?

And get caught with a new cable instead? No thanks. My father used similar methods of limiting tech time.

Addiction can happen to anyone, at any time, with anything.

We need a new generation of "Parental Controls", not for parents controlling what their kids can do, but adults controlling what their parents can do.

Same router story but my dad still spends his time reading books all day. I think the barrier of unfamiliarity with social media (and perhaps the disgust of an untailored algorithm) is just high enough that he will never

The elderly, the kids, the teenagers, the adults. Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.

The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.

> The biggest one humanity has ever seen.

Sugar, anyone?

Breathing

Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club.

I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".

Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system

This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one

Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself.

Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".

So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.

I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...

Try the Japanese food there, it's less sweet. Singaporean local food is Southern-Chinese style food, which is always very sweet.

Almost every cuisine Singapore serves will be sweeter relative to the authentic recipe. For example Korean food here is so sweet my wife thought she doesn't like Korean cuisine until she went to Seoul.

Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.

Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup

I lived in SG for 6 years of my life, have to resort to self cooking and western food because of exactly what you pointed out here.

Sushi rice might as well be candy

> now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter

Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.

Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:

- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]

- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]

- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]

- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.

If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.

[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".

[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.

[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.

If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.

>local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland"

sure sounds like someone needs a 10kg bag of sugar to be emptied down the back of his shirt on instagram live

Sugar is a pretty important component of human aerobic respiration, so about as difficult to unplug from as breathing:

glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) + oxygen (6O₂) → carbon dioxide (6CO₂) + water (6H₂O) + energy (ATP).

No one is debating whether glucose is or isn't a building block for life, the problem is that humans have evolved from an existence that has of food scarcity but now lives in a world of food abundance.

Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.

This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.

Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.

My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:

"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"

Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.

Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

Smoking is much harder to quit.

Restaurant food is optimized for everything but healthfulness.

Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.

Keto is not that hard. It's only hard if you like convenient food because almost all food products are geared towards sugar/carb addicts.

thinking then, that requires the extra oxygen

The reason it isn't, is because it's automatic. Your brain keeps you breathing as much as it can (if you hold your breath until you pass out, your brain will start breathing again for you). Breathing isn't reward driven. It doesn't engage the dopamine system the same way, eg cocaine does. You don't become tolerant to breathing the same way you do, eg cocaine. Lastly, for something to qualify for Substance Use Disorder (SUD), they need to keep doing it, despite social and health ramifications of continued use in the face of developing a tolerance for it. Other than some edgelord shit, no one's gonna give you shit for continuing to breath.

* Unless you have central hypoventilation syndrome, AKA Ondine's curse, where you can only breathe consciously.

* The worst addictions, i.e. all the ones really worthy of the name, punish you (or kill you) if you stop.

Thank you for saying it. Ever be around to watch kids grow up or have them yourself? The exposure and cultural, regulatory control that the junk food industry has here in USA is kind of amazing. Especially in schools. It's really insane but it's become accepted here it's normal for kids, toddlers to consume hundreds of grams of added/free sugars per day. Even infants if you think about it, when ever in human history does an infant grow up sucking down pulverized fruit packets multiple times a day, 365 days a year? This is totally normal and acceptable for most people today.

Did you ever go and eat a bag of pure sugar? Or rather a bag of sweets, which usually contain other stuff, not just sugar.

We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.

Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).

The cakes may have been healthier.

Thats my philosophy too. If you're full, you have no cravings at all. I have zero sugar cravings unless im really hungry, at which point real food is still the better option. Focusing on what you Should eat (nuts, berries, greens, etc) is much more rewarding than obsessing over what not to eat.

Sure, and doing chores around the house or walking the dog cures my phone cravings.

You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.

> You may be surprised how close many candies are to being pure sugar with food coloring.

Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.

It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.

You can literally read the nutrition facts for Nerds or Jolly Rancher lol

I literally don't have those in my country :) Based on labels I found online, seems "Jolly Rancher" is more or less 61% sugar of its total weight.

I'm not sure what you're looking at, the nutrition labels I see are like 17g sugar out of an 18g serving size

From https://www.myfooddiary.com/foods/143911/jolly-rancher-hard-... (maybe the wrong one?)

Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"

Ah yes I you're right, I was reading too quickly and read the carbs as sugar. That said having candies that are like 60-70% sugar is basically sugar in my book, especially since the rest is corn syrup.

Hence my tiredness of that soundbite, because it's almost never actually true. But I guess it depends on if you see "60% of contents is sugar" as "pure sugar with food coloring" or not, at least for me it's a difference but I understand for others it's basically the same.

There is a difference between 60% sugar and 100% sugar. Why is the difference between pure sugar and Jolly Ranchers meaningful to you? Is there a different outcome or recommendation? It’d certainly help to explain what difference you see and how that difference impacts your choices, rather than state that once exists without elaborating.

So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...

@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?

BTW, the current product website says Jolly Ranchers are 72% sugar: https://www.hersheyland.com/products/jolly-rancher-original-...

The other candy you cited, Nerds, is roughly 100% sugar.

https://www.nerdscandy.com/nerds

(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)

A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.

Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.

Some other chewy candies:

Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).

Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.

Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.

> especially since the rest is corn syrup.

Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".

As far as my doctor's diet guidelines go, that'd be 'effectively 17g of "sugar"'.

I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.

Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...

(plus some other quick search results)

https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...

https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...

> As far as my doctor's diet guidelines go, that'd be 'effectively 17g of "sugar"'.

> I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.

I don't think this really captures the concept of "sugar". Here's ordinary sourdough bread: https://beckmannsbakery.com/collections/sourdough-breads/pro...

Serving size 38g, 22g carbohydrate, 0g fiber.

By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.

(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)

Probably various forms of plant carbon compounds that don't count as fiber? Filler?

Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.

> Probably various forms of plant carbon compounds that don't count as fiber?

The difficulty I have with this idea is that they would have to also not count as "carbohydrate".

> Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.

Sodium is reported to the microgram, so we know that salt is 0.5g of it.

For one third of the bread to be "minerals", I'd start to worry that it'd be more like eating a rock than eating bread.

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that the missing weight is water.

Now take pure sugar, add a dash of mint essence and a little oil, dissolve in hot water then dry in a warm oven. Kendal mint cake.

Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.

Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.

You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.

The difference you’re tasting is primarily flavoring, not sugar density, so that’s not a great test. People can’t really tell the difference by taste between hard candy made of pure sugar and hard candy made of sugar plus cornstarch, especially when other flavors are added. But anyway, candy generally tastes insanely sweet and sugary to me. What is the point here? The fact that candy is mostly sugar and people say so predates TikTok by a bit… centuries? Isn’t candy defined as anything sweet where sugar is the primary ingredient?

How does having management strategies over an alleged addiction imply that it isn’t an addiction?

I take it you are unfamiliar with the “do not get addicted to water” speech in Mad Max.

> We're not addicted to sugar, (...) Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings".

Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.

I think this might be an issue that’s independent of sugar. Something something dopamine and serotonin. I also do not have issues with sugary foods, but I did in the past when my life was more stressful.

Look down the cart of your fellow shoppers the next time you go to the super market. Odds are some of them will have only huge bottles of sugar drink, sugar cereals and cookies.

I know it's going to generate a bunch of responses and consume a bunch of attention, but what value does this drive-by comment add to the discussion, really?

Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.

They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.

As you see in other comments, people are debating the relative net effects of other inventions of modernity. I think it is interesting and very HN to think about screens vs sugar. What value does your pearl clutching add to this discussion?

Sugar is not bad. https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml

Not inherently sure. It's a natural part of real food.

But the copious amounts we're ingesting these days? It's actually terrible. A major contributor to the coronary disease epidemic.

Yes but it's not just sugar - people are really missing the forest for the trees with this sugar stuff.

Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.

Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.

Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)

No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.

I was not saying it's inherently bad. I was saying it's addictive.

I'm directly answering to the comment above, that says:

> Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.

I disagree, sugar is bigger than screens.

And instead of complaining about my answering another comment, you can write an article about complaining.

This explains too much. I remember the Internet before corporate dominance and it was just as, if not more, magical then.

There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen.

The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations.

Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.

I have noticed that better devices just lead me to more time spent in apps I don’t really enjoy, just because I like the device itself.

I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.

It's a good idea. Companies try really hard to optimize and make everything they want you to do as easy and smooth as possible (and vice versa). Personally I avoid things like Apple Pay for this reason, it's there to remove friction from purchasing stuff, which results in us doing more of it.

I had a similar experience rebooting my 9yo iPhone [0] after a more recent one went out of service. Hours of screen procrastination got replaced with IRL activities/thinking. I decided to not repair the fancy LCD and keep the little friend. It’s been two years and I don’t feel going back soon.

Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do.

0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108

I’ve considered that as well, simply getting rid of the high tech altogether and going for a budget or old phone. My main issue with that is the camera, as I place a lot of importance in photos/videos.

I know some people have gone back to carrying a digital pocket camera, but I haven’t really bought into the idea for convenience and because I think taking it out has different social implications.

> taking it out has different social implications

It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.

I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?

The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.

Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.

For me it’s not really the risk that it will be well received, but rather that cameras trigger a more artificial response.

Selfies or phone pictures are quick and people mostly don’t react, but cameras make us pose, subconsciously. At least I feel a phone gets me more natural photos, that work better as memories of the moment.

The lack of instant online backup is also a good point, I don’t know if that’s on the table on newer models.

I have the same experience. I have felt it specially when moving to a new iPhone with 90 or 120Hz screen refresh frequency. Everything is so smooth that becomes pleasurable already by itself.

But not only that, also my work iPhone got recently upgraded from an old SE with small screen and laggy performance to the new 16e, and I found myself more eager to check work emails, ms teams than ever before.

I don’t think that’s a good development, but at the end it’s my responsibility and my own decision on how I use those devices. That also means I will probably downgrade to a worse iPhone instead of getting the best available.

Huge agree. Apple likes to pay lip service to this with "screen time" features, but will they make a smaller phone for people who don't want their life centered around staring at the shiny screen? No, because they don't sell as much as big phones.

This explains too little. I remember TV before corporate dominance and it was nowhere as bad as cable-TV.

It's hard to believe but initially the content was much thoughful, with actual cultural gems produced for it. Then that content got pushed further and further late at night and eventually disapeared. We can categorize that trend as some kind of "natural erosion" but that'd be ignoring the various forces that fought to change that medium, one of which may be lazy humans relinquishing their soul to the beautiful screen, but another sure one is profit seeking through selling advertisement.

Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status. Now it's socially acceptable to spend time in video games.

> Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status.

I don't remember that time. Even the "jocks" loved Mattel Football. And what else were they going to do in school, pay attention to the teacher? ;-)

Exactly. I was in elementary school when those Mattel games came out and the kids who had them were very popular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_drift

Ye Discovery channel etc used to be serious. By todays standard I guess MTV would be considered fancy.

I disagree, I guess, except for your comment: "and with million times more content"

That's it in a nutshell, I think. We had television at home since I was maybe 10 years old but the content that would interest a kid was very neatly time-slotted to small segments of each day (with Sunday being essentially an entertainment desert to a kid).

So TV was boring most of the day so we went outside, or if Winter, found ways to amuse ourselves indoors. I drew pictures, played board games with my sister, wired up a circuit with my 65-in-1 electronics kit…

The other half of that is that they used to make 65-in-1 electronics kits. And they were actually educational. There was an expectation that leisure activities could nevertheless improve you as a person. Now you have to go looking for that sort of experience, and it generally only happens as an adult, who has already developed skills and taste to do so.

There is plenty of electronics-oriented content online that will teach you way more than 65 circuits. It's not "hands on" in the sense those Radio Shack kits were, but that's what Sparkfun is for.

And I just checked their site, and what do you know... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-inventors-kit-for-micropyt...

Electronics is still not so bad, but today's chemistry sets have definitely lost a bit of their "fun" parts ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-f...

"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."

How much do you disagree if you agree with the root of the argument?

Whatever it was that made humans enjoy books, newspapers, magazines, movies, tv shows, written correspondence, phone calls, etc, is now available times a million, 24/7, in your pocket, essentially free (if you don’t count externalities ofc). Plus the ability to handle a huge number of admin and business tasks from anywhere. Not hard to see why it’s so addictive for almost everyone.

Good point. I think I was reacting to the notion that we like the physicality of the tech — the OLED, whatever. I think the content is the point (and the lack of content for a kid when there were just four TV stations).

> Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.

Who is getting obese from fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and the like?

People will eat a whole bag of salted potato chips or a whole container of ice cream in a sitting, but who eats a whole bag of oranges in a sitting?

I think that's precisely the point. Junk food is _engineered_ to be irresistible.

It seems like the person I quoted was denying a major role for junk food, though.

I used to drink orange juice. Around 2 liter a day. I've learned since that it was almost as bad as drinking 2 liter of non caffeinated soda.

It should be needless to say that oranges are more than just juice.

Yes, something i didn't know whan i was 18. It's not easy to know what to eat when you're young, and to pick up bad habits. Then when overeating destroyed your hormonal balance (insulin, ghrelin are appetite regulating hormones that which imbalance can make a tiny bit of hunger massive and painfull), it's extremely hard to adopt "normal" eating habits without a lot of stability in your life.

Right and people don't stop and think that a 16oz glass of orange juice is like 6 oranges worth. An orange is fine. 6 at a time is ridiculous.

I will absolutely eat a whole bag of oranges in a sitting.

Are you obese?

I suppose that for any given action, there's likely always someone who will do it, but in any case a bag of oranges has significantly different nutritional properties than a bag of chips. How many oranges are we talking about, and what size oranges?

Oranges are mostly water...I could definitely eat 4 or 5 in one sitting, and I'm not obese.

> I could definitely eat 4 or 5 in one sitting

I could too... if I wanted to. For me at least, oranges are not the type of food that inspires me to binge. Do you seriously not understand why people tend to binge on certain foods and not on others? In any case, 5 oranges is at most maybe 400 calories, very low fat and sodium.

> I'm not obese.

Which is my original point: "Who is getting obese from fresh fruit"

Compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we have a practically unlimited supply of fruit, but I don't think thats really the problem.

Yes, we all have a TV on our office desks now.

Something we could not have imagined a few decades ago.

And the worst part is the advertisements. I'm trying to get work done, thank you.

UBlock origin is your friend.

If you can’t install it because you’re using chrome, switch to a real browser :)

Call me delusional but I don't trust browser extensions.

Ok - you’re delusional, uBlock origin is widely used and safe.

Understandable, but you shouldn't trust the ads, either.

That's a fine default stance. But uBO is one of, and some would say the only, extension that you should evaluate on its own merits rather than stereotyping with the rest of the category.

Then install AdGuard on your network and pick any of the multiple solutions that let you run your DNS for all of your devices through it.

But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.

> But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.

uBlock origin is 307k lines of code. Yes, you could read it all, but its an impractical task.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting uBO is untrustworthy, but just because a piece of software is open source doesn't mean it is practical for an individual to audit the code themselves.

You use and trust other software for which you can’t read the source code (either not available or impractical as you said). Why?

I'm not the person who orignally said they dont use extensions. I have no issue using uBO or other extensions.

I'm sure typing this comment and sending it over the internet involves billions of lines of code running on countless pieces of hardware. Of course there has to be some level of trust somewhere.

Not only that, but what if the browser extension changes owners? We've seen this in the past when suddenly trustworthy code turned not so trustworthy.

How do you keep track of this? Yes you can read the diffs, but not really practical.

I'll just wait until Firefox ships with a secure sandbox for extensions.

Fair, but the risk of malware is probably much greater if you don't use an ad blocker. Most ads are scams are phishing these days. Even if you're quite savvy, you can always misclick.

We have TVs and 24/7 cable in our pockets, the current online experience resembles the yesteryear cable TV, except it’s more nocive and trackable

Would you characterize opiate addiction as an abundance of neurotransmitters? You're missing the forest for the trees.

An abundance of easily accessible opiates didn't help.

Can we stop redefining-down the word "pandemic" please? I think enough people are already going to stick their fingers in their ears and go "na na na" when the next actual pandemic virus comes along. Maybe just skip the comparison and say screen addiction is the most dangerous addiction humanity's ever seen. Then it just sounds like a normal hyperbole. Or try these:

"Screen addiction is an apocalypse"

"Screen addiction is a genocide"

...

It will interesting to see what term historians use. I suppose it depends on how disastrous they see our societal fetish for technology.

Historians attribute the decline of the Roman Empire to lead in the water, but that doesn't make it a pandemic, it's something else. The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic. I'm arguing that it serves no purpose to conflate terms describing endemic social problems with those describing acute disease. In this case, language is important, and frequently weaponized.

>Can we stop

No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)

Redefining "pandemic" is basically word violence!

Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here

I'm not sure I agree. We had all these complaints about TV going back to the 1970s (the earliest clear memories I have). It was called "the plug in drug" and "the boob tube."

Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.

If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."

It's just something to do to fill the boredom.

What exactly do you not agree with?

Perhaps they disagree with the idea that it’s an addiction or that it’s a problem with screens in particular, rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.

I can see that, but IMO the main difference is that this feels like it's intentionally trying to be an active detriment to your life. TV et. al are fairly neutral generally. Even with the ads.

But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money.

And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?

This. Targeted adds + bespoke algorithms make our current tech incomparable to the previous boogeyman of TV et al. We have devices that are designed to keep and farm our attention at all costs

> rather than a problem with people not being able to or not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways.

That's literally what an addiction is.

An addiction would be you struggle to stop doing it. That would suggest they have no issue stopping, given a more interesting option.

“I can stop any time I want!”

You don't stop doing drugs because there's some movie you want to see. People do get off their phones for that.

Have you seen how many people watch movies these days? Even in the cinema they are scrolling.

Not touching alcohol for 12 hours a day does not mean you are not an alcoholic.

If you stare at a wall all day because you have nothing to do, are you addicted to staring at the wall, or do you just have nothing to do?

If someone stops drinking for a long enough period, with no urge to return to drinking, then yes, they aren't an alcoholic. You just made up a silly 12 hour window so you could beat a straw man to death.

If an alcoholic has been clean for decades, he is still an alcoholic, because the second he takes alcohol again, his brain switches back to addiction mode. That's the thing with addictions, they even destroy the good feeling you initially had about with drug.

When you are staring at a wall all day, you can probably think of a lot of other things you could do and did. When you stare at a wall all day, and think of nothing and enjoy it, then I would say you have mental problems. The problem isn't that you do something for a long time, the problem is that you can't think of something else or can't control you to do something else, even if you want.

> people not being able to spend their free time in other ways

> people not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways

Are two indications how it is difficult to stop something.

Nah, this misses the point entirely. The scale of the problem today is multiple orders of magnitude greater, for several reasons.

First, TVs were stationary. Unlike smartphones, you couldn't take them wherever you went. If you were wealthier, you could somewhat compensate for this by having multiple TVs, for example in the bedroom in addition to the living room. But whenever you stepped outside your house the TV did not come with you. Places like doctors offices or hotel lobbies might have them in waiting rooms but that was really it in terms of the average person's exposure.

Second, TV programming was not explicitly designed to be addictive. Sure, studios wanted people to watch their programs because that's how they got ad revenue, but they had neither sophisticated tools nor the methods to dial addictiveness to the max. They did not have algorithms, for example, to serve you personalized content based on your tastes and desires. You picked from a limited selection of what was available in that week's programming.

Third, TVs did not have built-in mechanisms to demand re-engagement when you had them turned off. No such thing as notifications. At best you had blurbs about what is next on the program, but those were both channel-specific and also required your TV to be on. So people were not constantly bombarded with micro dopamine hits like they are today.

I could go on, but yeah, your rebuttal does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What we have today is a global scale addiction. It is absolutely nothing like TVs or newspapers/books before them.

You points about TV may stand but they don't apply to books, newspapers and magazines.

All three of which I have seen people walking on the sidewalk while reading, btw.

Scale not only matters, it's pretty much the only thing that matters.

That's why me having a butter knife is of no concern, but they certainly won't give me the nuclear launch codes.

I think even highly-engaging well-written high-production-value TV doesn't satiate all of your brain's achievement circuits. Being an Internet native, I was binge watching shows well before the term was invented, and before shows were fluffed out to compensate for bulk half-engaged viewing. When an episode ends I don't want to leave the universe - it's so easy to up-arrow, backspace to the episode number, tab, enter. But I always found there was kind of a limit whereby eventually I would have "had enough" and move on to something different to feel like I was actually achieving something - getting back to work, social interaction, physical chores, etc.

Whereas the plethora of web/apps can provide simulations for all those different circuits in your brain, as you move between them each satiating a different aspect of your personality. And then when you've got time to really "relax", you can still turn on TV in the background to be engaged in multiple low effort stimulations at once.

TV is still addictive, and it was. I felt it myself in 80s and 90s, good content was rare and I had to set an alarm in the middle of the night to watch some good stuff. And stick around 5 minute block of ads. Active screens, especially ones always in the pocket or on the table, are way more addictive.

It takes some... special mindset to be polite to not see it literally everywhere, the scale and intensity of it, the addiction of kids especially. They have no freakin' defenses and often didn't experience normal life, ever. Ask any child psychologist about their opinion of screens among kids before say 14, and even afterwards.

It can be fought, we are quite successful so far with our kids and we have quite a few parents around us with same mindset, but we have to lead by example.

Easiest is to unplug from active social cancers (fb, instagram, tiktok or whatever kids are addicted to these days). Ignore most of the news, read about topic from source far away from place/country affected. TV can serve some quality content but one has to do some effort, no ads. Computer games are a waste of time and life (I know, I've wasted half of my childhood with them, 100x that for any online gaming), if one is bored then get a sport, passion, read a book, force yourself into some social action, whatever is vastly better. Then comes along junk food, again parents lead by examples.

Life is freakin' short, its pretty sad view to waste it on all above in more than a minimal fashion. Its sort of life success in 'look I am not a homeless person or heroine addict', but just a good fat notch above that. Literally anybody can do better.

I agree with quite a few points here especially on short form content and the mainstream news these days. However on computer games I am still a little undecided. I tend to (try to?) play "creative" games... think Minecraft, Factorio, etc... where you have the chance to execute some project or vision without any real world costs.

Thinking about it, my overall position is to maintain a balance between dopamine from long-term sources and short-term ones. I think long-running creative projects that make you think are generally good whether they are digital (see: 3D animators/artists) or physical - it's just personal preference which one you tend towards. The types of games I try to limit are those with temporary rounds/matches/etc... unlike a Minecraft world, there is no cumulative aspect, no long-term planning apart from your own increase in skill. Despite that, the short satisfaction from momentary successes in each game keep you playing.

Look, there are way more harmful ways to spend time than those creative games you mention. It can be even net positive for many, especially compared to more mind numbing activities.

I just hate seeing them in hands of kids who should get development pressures from anything but glowing interactive screens, and generally folks who form addictions very easily (I am simply on the opposite side for whatever reason, when comparing to many peers in various drugs but also general mental habits... but I feel if I fell for it hard enough my defenses would weaken across the board, probably permanently).

We do the opposite of what you do.

I'm curious how you reconcile reading and commenting on HN multiple times a day every day with the lifestyle you claim to live.

Not the OP, but it's because what's on HN is generally much more informative than the 10-sec TikTok meme videos and click-bait news headlines or FB feeds. I wouldn't be on HN otherwise. (I deleted my FB account 10 years ago, and my Twitter account 3 years ago.)

I never claimed I live a perfect life, but I am trying my best and calling things proper names, even if they are ugly and harmful (in my opinion) yet feel good. Too much time spent in HN comments can be harmful too obviously, mind easily falls for addictive behavioral patterns. Although for me its probably best really good usable information from all aspects of life gained vs time spent ratio for all discussed. And spending 0-30 mins daily, usually during work, commute or similar empty time rather than reading some outrage-filled news is something I am fine with.

Is what I describe so unreachable for you that you make your words make sound... unkind?

I am also doing these passions while helping raising 2 small kids: hiking, sport climbing, via ferratas, skiing, ski touring, diving, and recently abandoned paragliding due to brushing death in pretty bad accident. Those take way more time and effort than coming here. I spend almost 0 time in front of TV, don't have consoles, play like 1 game per 2 years, offline and on desktop PC only (last one was Baldur's Gate 3).

We've had those complaints for a long time, and associated stereotypical problems with them - like daydrinking housewives. And now we have increased loneliness, mental health issues, etc. So maybe there's something to the complaints. Maybe sticking your face in media cloistered away at home 24/7 is worse for the mental health of most people than socializing, having to get out there and find ways to entertain yourself with others.

If you never practice making and having friends, how are you ever going to have them?

Where would those friends ever be in the first place? Everyone I know and see is on their phone doing the same exact thing. Nobody socializes except at work where they're forced to be.

at least from what i've seen, most Americans now live in communities where even if they wanted to there are an increasing lack of places to just hang out, particularly if you don't want booze involved.

the real estate shortage is driving two effects; places not optimized for revenue are being priced out of existence, and workers need higher wages to pay housing costs which squeezes these places further and results in things like shorter operating hours even if full closure doesn't happen.

Something like 75% of the residential land in the US is zoned exclusively for SFH. There's not even a third place to squeeze because it's just houses.

Not a super useful metric because third places probably wouldn’t be zoned residential. This is like saying 75% of fruits are apples, so there’s no room for asparagus

Ideally they would be in a place zoned residential, just not exclusively residential. If everything is zoned for only single family homes, there won't be a third place nearby. The density is low and it's not mixed use.

The US has the highest retail square foot per capita by a long shot.

This is old but even with the mall apocalypse, we haven’t had a reduction from 20+ sq ft per person to the 3-4 normal in Western Europe and Japan. https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-apocalypse-is-still-i...

I would actually say the (indoor) mall apocalypse is a contributing factor since for all their faults, malls were third places in a way that strip shopping centers are not.

At least for retail the problem is moreso that lenders and landlords are playing hot potato with inflated rent and extend and pretend; some(most?all?) commercial loans go into default if rent goes below a certain amount

Malls aren't that dead yet, for starters.

"Hey come over to my place" also works.

"Let's grab dinner."

If they weren't constantly driving themselves to distraction most people would be able to make at least 1 or 2 friends at work or from a shared hobby, based on the experience of all the decades prior.

The US not having "third spaces" went into the founding story of Starbucks. The big difference today is people not even having friends and no longer knowing how to even do so, thanks to the addiction machines. Why risk rejection when you can just go back to your scroll?

malls have basically also optimized for sales per square foot to the detriment of their former status as hangout spots. at the modern mall, "kids just hanging out" is considered a loitering nuisance these days. and the malls that are surviving are those geared towards upper incomes, which means that the availability of third places is bifurcating like everything else in the economy.

amongst the people I know, a fair amount are not able to willing or host events because they have roommates who they are not necessarily friends with; and amongst those lucky enough to live alone, new build apartment sizes have been shrinking.

You weren’t watching TV every free instant you had, like at a red light, on the escalator, while using the urinal, etc. I mean some of these people must not think at all. All free time they could have spent daydreaming or planning or whatever is just taken up by the dumb app in tiny dopamine driving chunks of time. This has to have some effect on brain wiring over time. Just giving yourself absolutely no time for your own thoughts.

guiltily looks up from HN while stopped at a red light

Insane to be using a phone in that manner while driving regardless.

Yep. You'd be shocked (or maybe not) at how many people I looking at their phones on a freeway.

I wonder if there's any statistics comparing deaths and injuries from drunk driving versus distracted driving over the past 20 years or so. Is it a comparable at all?

We had opium dens in the past, why not fentanyl dens today?

It's just something to do to fill the boredom.

(That's to say: Just because something was mildly bad in the past doesn't mean that the current, somewhat similar, thing in the present isn't horrifically bad. The issues are orthogonal +- 5deg max)

If we kept opium dens there probably wouldn’t be widespread fentanyl use, isn’t it a reaction to the challenges of getting less dangerous opiates, i.e. is more potent and easier to smuggle?

Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.

My comment wasn't really about drug consumption and policy, that was just a metaphor...

People did watch too much TV, and it was bad.

They still do it's just replaced with YT or NF or TT or IG

TV in the ‘70s cannot possibly be compared to what we are up against today…

Too true. Then we elected a reality TV star president. Just ‘cause humanity survived doesn’t mean it thrived.

It was bad then. But it's much worse now because it's ubiquitous -- you're carrying it around in your pocket to fill every empty moment. Not to mention that back then, your "favorite shows" were on a couple of times a day if you were lucky. Now, it's 24/7.

The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.

There maybe something more than that. Maybe modern life and the great financial crisis have put us all into more stress, more work, so that we don’t have time for real relationships. It’s part of why politics have shifted the way they do.

I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics).

I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.

This got both of my parents. What's interesting is that neither of them really used a computer or smartphone much, but both got addicted to iPads in their late 60s.

What they do in their free time is their business, but it often even messes with human interaction. I've been midsentence with them in person when they'd just pull out their iPad for a quick scroll, completely oblivious that I was even there or talking to them. What's weird is that it almost reminds me of a person taking a quick vape or smoke... I'm not even sure they realize why they're doing it.

But we still sell and consume all these products. We willingly bring them into our home. It's maddening and totally self-inflicted.

The problem is they are both drugs and productivity devices. I have two iPads and I love them. I use a Mini exclusively for book reading and logging workouts. I use a Pro for video calls and occasionally YouTube videos.

The addiction didn’t get me through them… on the other hand, here I am posting HN comments instead of doing something productive so it did reach me through my phone.

> on the other hand, here I am posting HN comments instead of doing something productive

I feel like there are worst ways to spend time on devices than reading/responding to HN.

I know it can be addicting/a distraction, too, and I try to limit my time with it.

But I don’t feel that the highs and lows are near as bad here vs. other forms of social media & content consumption.

Agreed, but I do try to remind myself to limit use even here.

You are seriously kidding yourself if you think reading threads here is any better than reading reddit or Instagram or whatever

It is. By a long shot too.

Your comments on here show you get into the same pointless arguments and make the same dumb quips everyone on Reddit does. Not sure what makes you think you're doing anything different here

> I've been midsentence with them in person when they'd just pull out their iPad for a quick scroll, completely oblivious that I was even there or talking to them.

Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this? I have a relative that does this all the time and it's beyond infuriating.

It's even gotten to the point where we'll be having a family discussion, they'll pull out there phone to text, come back to Earth, and then get furious with us because we don't fill them in to what they missed and restart the conversation at the point where they stopped listening.

Either call it out, or stop talking and forget where you stopped. Having to awkwardly restart an interrupted conversation sometimes gets the message across.

When I was younger, a mix of both fixed that nasty habit of mine.

Absolutely, because they have the time for it and fewer alternatives. I got my mom a tablet, set her up with ReVanced YouTube & Twitter plus VLC, and now she is by far the heaviest user of our NAS, last Kindle user on our Amazon account, and reachable on Signal pretty much always.

Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.

This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.

> This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.

Amazing analysis.

> because they have the time for it and fewer alternatives

What are you referring to by fewer alternatives? Isn't there way more ways / activities / infrastructure to spend your time these days than before?

With age your company dwindles as people drift away (or die) so you have fewer people with which to enjoy these activities and many become less attainable/enjoyable with lower physical strength and endurance.

Most of the current elderly also grew up in an era where they believed cities and urban areas were bad, so they moved out to the suburbs where everything is farther away and requires driving. It requires a lot more effort to do anything and they have effectively isolated themselves.

My grandparents who lived in a city could walk down the street, get groceries, and easily meet friends for a snack or chat. Even when they were alone, they were part of a community. My parents' generation all live far away from each other, struggle to get out of the house, and are scared of strangers.

Why would you give your mother access to Twitter, genuinely curious.

My mom had access already. I just patched her app to not show ads, allow video downloads, and have nicer colors.

Twitter is also the best news app. You get the info, trend, and critical commentary (with people you follow boosted for you in the comments) all in one go.

Maybe OP's mom was really abusive?

> Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.

I'm confident TV off and book is better than youtube, for the purpose of maintaining and agile mind.

I'm certain there is a lot more very good content on YT than anywhere on TV, but that's unfortunately not the content that google is pushing toward the users.

(Yes, I'm aware that they push whatever the users click onto and whatever makes them profit; I don't care, I still believe they should push the best content).

I didn't say youtube vs TV, I said youtube vs books.

My dad watches niche car repair videos on YouTube and my mom does online art classes. Back when we didn’t have fast internet, my mom would watch crappy reality TV shows out of boredom.

I think overall, the internet is taking up more of their time than books/tv did in the past (just as it does for me), but it also gives them access to quality content within their niche interests.

I didn't say youtube vs TV, I said youtube vs books.

these days books are no guarantee of quality

It never was, we just don't remember the garbage ones.

Books have a lot of undeserved cultural cachet, in my view. It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

Fiction books are full of outright lies =)

But even nonfiction books tend to fail fact-checks: https://reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/cwa4uv/how_acc...

That’s true for most mass market crap but that’s a low bar because it’s all just escapism in a different format. Books still have a much higher signal to noise ratio and information density than all content short of academic textbooks or courses (and I’ll die on that hill).

Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.

Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.

> After the Ice

Thank you for that recommendation! Looks great.

FWIW here's a critique I found based on a quick Google search: https://reddit.com/r/Archeology/comments/1ksaqw9/after_the_i...

I wonder if it makes sense to just avoid reading anthropology books until the field settles down a little more.

> Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap.

I think Sapiens is an interesting case, because, in my situation, I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed it so much that I started to question everything I was hearing and spent at least twice as many hours checking what the author said than listening.

To the point that now I completely forgot the content of the book, but learned about so many things that I would probably had no reason to learn about without the book. So it acted as a gateway with me. Meanwhile I know of other people who took it as gospel and are now living with a polarized mindset.

IMO this kinda illustrates my point about cultural cachet. Going down a Wikipedia-driven rabbit hole doesn't have cultural cachet. Looking up sources from a prestigious book does have cultural cachet. But they are sort of the same activity?

> That's true for most mass market crap but that's a low bar because it's all just escapism in a different format.

Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.

As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.

I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.

So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.

"[The Dawn of Everything] suffers from serious shortcomings: the authors’ commitment to an excessively idealist view of historical dynamics, their use of rhetorical strategies that misguide their audience, and their resultant inability to account for broad trajectories of human development."

Source: https://zenodo.org/records/5907061

>the notes section

Why not just browse Wikipedia if notes are what you're after?

> It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?

Oops, I've only seen now, that my comment occurred twice, and now I can't delete it. :-)

> It's common for a book to have about a blog post's worth of useful information.

What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?

Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.

If you go to a bookstore and flip through a lot of the recently released stuff, especially the celebrity books, a lot of them are really thin on content. Especially if you grew up reading dense novels and textbooks, it can be surprising to see what the mass market for books is like.

> recently released stuff

That's a tiny slice of the books on the market though and these are books that weren't already proven to be good by the test of time. I don't think most books sold are recently released by a huge margin. The only publication where recently released matters are specifications, papers, documentation and news, but these tend to be mostly online or digital these days.

Here are some books I've read from semi-recently which felt like they had "about a blog post's worth of useful information" (probably an exaggeration, but still):

https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Steam-Money-Industrial-Revolutio...

https://www.amazon.com/Rents-How-Marketing-Causes-Inequality...

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...

Oftentimes such books will repeat their core points over and over, or include a lot of detail which feels irrelevant/overly technical and I will soon forget. In my experience, it's surprisingly common for books written for a general audience to include technical details and descriptions which are only meaningful for a specialist. Even though the book is hundreds of pages long, and there's plenty of room, the author still doesn't provide the necessary background knowledge to interpret the technical details they're including.

>Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.

Any tips on finding such books?

You don't read, typically, for fact-ness. The more facts you know doesn't mean your mind works better or you're smarter. Those are pretty much separate things.

Books are mostly for comprehension and critical thinking.

The problem with facts is that they're a bit anti-critical thinking. They're just true - there's no debate, or philosophy, or introspection.

Fiction makes you think. About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc. Facts don't really do that.

There's no one stopping you from engaging in critical thought watching a YouTube video either. And some of the most interesting conversations I've had with my partner about the world and relationships have come after watching a TV show or playing a game together. Screens are just another medium folks.

I don't disagree with this - I was addressing the notion that fictional work is somehow less valuable than non-fiction.

>Fiction makes you think.

A good computer game makes you think too.

The strategic play in this game is very deep: https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/

If I had a kid, I would be tempted to have them play Slay the Spire as a homework assignment, to teach practical arithmetic and critical thinking. (No reading wikis or discussion forums; you have to figure out the best strategies for yourself!)

>About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc.

This statement is also true for movies, TV shows, AskReddit discussions, etc. Yet they don't have the same cultural cachet as fiction.

I agree, again, I was not addressing this - I was addressing the notion that fictional work is somehow less valuable than non-fictional work.

Fictional work is very valuable, in a unique way that non-fiction work, whether the medium be video games, literature, or television, cannot capture.

Look at the books people actually read, and you won't be as confident.

Haha, you think that's where leisure time went??

Wow. Everyone always had kids. Capitalism is why you have no time at all to live AND why you that's your fault.

I'm done with HN for the day.

Why capitalism? How about taxation and over-regulation? And if not that, what about envy? You could live like an Irish immigrant 100 years ago, with a wood stove and an outdoor latrine. But you’re not going to want that if everyone around you has got a/c, stainless steel appliances and a Toto washlet.

>how about taxation and over-regulation

Are you convinced that people’s lives get better and that workers get paid more, every time, with less regulation? What about e.g. planned obsolescence or web enshittification or any other strategy where a company can increase its profits by making its product worse? What about mass consumer advertising that constantly manipulates people into buying stuff they don’t care about and wouldn’t have bought before by making them feel like it will give them unrelated things like status or family? Market competition doesn’t solve these problems, it spreads them.

> you could live like an irish immigrant

I think our society builds what we want to a really large degree. People get taught to feel like getting rich or middle class or whatever is what they should be doing, or like having the expensive car is important. We don’t pop put of the womb knowing what the hell we should want and we learn to want a whole lot of shit we could go without. Also, you’d really struggle to construct that lifestyle for yourself. The only places where land would be cheap enough to be proportional would be sparse places where most work would be hard to find. You’d still need to drive to your jobs presumably, since you wouldn’t have a computer, so you’re paying for a beater, maintenance, gas and insurance. you would probably want to avoid a salaried position because the vast majority of them are gonna want you to work more than 15 hours a week, which cuts you out of a lot of the best paying jobs. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but you’d have to have a lot of knowledge to do it. There’s a real barrier to entry there.

My mum, almost 70, is a speed reader, but extreme. She reads a novel a day and is constantly reading. Not sure it is much better...

I have noticed the same trend with my parents. The people that were insisting that I was spending too much time as a child in front of the computer and should get out, are now retired and permanently glued to their phones.

Same. When I’m visiting my parents, I sometimes check the Screen Time stats on my dad’s iPad. Consistently, he’s spending around 30 hours per week on YouTube. It has pretty much replaced TV for him.

I can hardly get my mother, father or in laws to look at us anymore when we visit, they just look at social media and sometimes comment on whatever they saw and share it with me, sometimes via a message too. It's weird but for us, it's been going on since FB and Pintrest but Instagram and TikTok have taken the addiction to new levels.

They basically wouldn't travel to anywhere quality, high speed internet isn't present.

"Facebook has done to our parents what they thought video games would do to us."

Mine didn't even like having a TV in the house and now my mom can't sleep without her iPad:( she's 64

Same experience in a European country. Parents didn't get a TV for the home when we were kids. Now neither parent can eat full meal or hold a conversation without looking at something from their phones, even when they have guests over. I spend WAY too much time online as well, but I make sure I do not take out my phone during meals, when talking to someone, etc.

Just got back from Reno, and I can confirm that there are hundreds of old ladies there addicted to playing video games all day. (But I grew up in Vegas, and this ain't news... The Economist should check their local slot parlor, or fruit machines or whatever they call it there).

Oh yeah, the videos of the (mostly elderly) sitting in front of a slot machine just pulling the lever like a zombie are dystopian.

And in the even worse cases they don’t even get up to go to the bathroom anymore. They just let it all loose.

I see this every day, elderly brain rotting watching fake ai generated videos on youtube.

Youtube and big tech will have to answer for this eventually.

If I know one thing for sure, big tech will never have to answer for anything.

If they didn't have to answer for iPad babies then unfortunately they won't have to answer for this either.

I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.

I wouldn't really call it "demand". It's more like one-shotting humans with a product which maximally stimulates them through what is basically a psychological hack.

We were not built with the capacity to handle the sheer amount of stimulation the modern world has. You have to put in a lot of effort to not succumb to natural desires that would have been adaptive behaviours until recent history.

Succumbing to constant distraction, even if a natural desire, would never have been a successful evolutionary strategy for an individual organism. Spending large amounts of time absorbing and repeating bullshit has proven to be a pretty successful group survival strategy throughout human history, though.

Lets call it a next great man-made filter. Weak personalities will take a hit and have a lesser life compared to their potential, the ones more mentally resilient or with good parents (or both) gain a clear advantage in basically all aspects of life. Waiting around for state regulations to cover our asses has always been a bad move, and its same now. They will come but too little too late, one has to fight for oneself and closest ones in true capitalist spirit, and this is indeed distilled capitalism at work. Its jungle out there, and servants of the biggest predators form like 50% of this very forum (go ahead and downvote some meaningless number in DB, but take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself how good human being you truly are).

I can't bring myself to feel much sympathy for the ones that fully realize this, and yet go full speed to their addictions, even push it to their kids since good parenting always take a lot more continuous effort. We keep discussing this mind cancer for a decade here, its not something shocking on any level for anybody who gives a fraction of a f*k about their quality of life or mental health. The rest has bread and games for the poor, version 2025.

Switch demand to desire and you're closer to the truth.

The article suggests there’s evidence that screen time has the opposite effect. A little surprising but I guess for a lot of people it is more stimulating than watching the news or soaps all day

It says it’s unclear which way the causation goes.

Did anyone ever have to answer for all the shit that is/was on TV and news rags?

If no one ever did, why would YouTube be different ?

Even normal television has gone to full on elderly brainrot, and the TV personalities are behind it.

Go watch an episode of 25 Words or Less on your local broadcast station and watch how much slop is peddled on the show between the colorful noises (dear God those horns in the jingles are pure torture). They've fully tied in slop mobile games (some Solitaire game) into main gameplay advertising, they pull in horribly grainy live video from elderly "superfans" joining along from home, it's all just one giant slop machine before the evening news.

Why don’t they search for topics that interest them though? Surely not all of them are tech literate enough to scroll, but not search. My friend’s dad in his 70s watches nature documentaries and people like ItchyBoots on YouTube.

They are lobbying harder than ever before, look at the recent inauguration and who was there. Thy will never answer for any of it. They control information. They control the narrative.

Their answer is yes.

This reminds me of elderly people addicted to cable news. Once separated from TV they can only talk about politics, but it’s weirdly up to the minute and yet still so poorly informed.

To its credit, the article avoids mention of various "generations," which are a pretty unscientific prism through which to view the world. Yet there is still something to be learned from looking at a particular age cohort and its cultural zeitgeist. The people reaching retirement age today are the oldest members of Generation X. People born in 1965 are turning 60 this year. These people first had access to gaming consoles and personal computers cheap enough for general consumers when they were in their teens. They were 18 in 1983 when Atari crashed, and 28 during Eternal September in 1993. So it's no wonder the numbers are increasing in older people. People have a tendency to think a demographic like "older people" is static, when it's really a sliding window. Digitally-savvy people are simply aging into it. And you will too.

Nah, it's more than that. My very boomer parents just sit on the couch doom scrolling all day, and they were late getting smartphones.

Although they also got us Ataris in the early 80s and internet access in the late 80s, so they were technology forward through their whole lives. So maybe they lived more like late Gen X...

I think you are correct. Tech was binning people and older Gen X slid forward identifying with late Gen X much more than those on the other side of the divide.

Elderly gen-x are screen addicts because they had access to gaming consoles and computers? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment. Not every gen-xer was strapped to a console growing up.

My boomer parents and their friends are all staring to their phones wa-a-ay more often than I’d consider healthy. At least as much as my millenial/xennial friends.

Social media and attention stealing algos are addictive and unhealthy, regardless of the age group. If anything I’d say that gen-x is uniquely positioned - old enough to have experienced the world without the internet, young enough to see the consequences of it.

I am elderly and I am an addict. But my screen addiction is only a small part of my lifelong problem. The real, root cause, my major malfunction, is an ongoing aversion to reality, a constant urge and willfulness to escape, an addiction to fantasy and an increasing willingness to indulge myself.

I am not alone in this.

Yes, my first screen addiction was probably the NTSC broadcasts from a black & white childhood, but all those paperbacks counted too, Heinlein and Fleming and MacDonald et al.

Even my early career as a software engineer was motivated by a self-indulgent escape from reality. I preferred the small world of intense coding in 6510 cycle shaving loops, to the expansive reality that surrounded my basement. The outside world went on without me as my screen addiction grew all the way to 640x400.

Now people enjoy an escape into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). I've been living there since the print versions were only 12 cents each.

Nowadaze everybody I know have become as addicted as I've always been. But is it a problem for society? Or is shared fantasy the actual basis on which our society is built?

The problem of algorithmic feeds gets a modest amount of attention, but I still think its not nearly enough. Addicting feeds are evil. If we ever manage to make it beyond them, we'll reflect on them with the same regret as slavery.

A quote from an author I like, Matthew Crawford: "Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness. Appropriations of our attention are then an especially intimate matter."

I can't really envision a solution, frankly. On a personal level, I have tried dozens of strategies to use my phone less, including deleting many of my social media accounts, and regrettably, its still an issue. My best guess is legislation that bans machine-learning algorithms on newsfeeds. But there are billions of dollars and a dysfunctional government (speaking U.S. here) motivated against that outcome.

The HN homepage feed is non-algorithmic (at least the sense that the algorithm isn't personalized). Does that actually make a big difference?

For me, absolutely. And the fact that it’s text-only helps enormously too. The way I interact with HN is fine to me. I skim the posts once a day and read maybe one or two.

I’ve never scrolled hours away on HN.

I think it's also important that HN doesn't have infinite scrolling. It's old-school: 30 items per page, click at the bottom to go to the next page.

I made a rule for myself that I would never go past page 2 of HN. So, each morning, I see 60 items, and if none of them interest me, then I just move on with my day. I think that's why I never became addicted.

If you didn’t have that rule would you go past page 2? Frankly I just don’t find HN articles as cheaply and quickly mentally palatable as other sites. The content here is usually more cognitively demanding, so I don’t end up scrolling.

Depends how bored I was at work ;-)

The rate at which content ends up on the front page is also slower than your ability to consume it. So even if you do keep clicking, you end up on yesterday's links you've already read.

OK so in this comment, and child comments, a number of hypotheses are mentioned for why HN is fine:

* HN is text-only

* HN lacks infinite scroll

* HN adds new content slowly

* HN is cognitively demanding

My guess is that these factors are most important. If you held them constant and added a recommendation engine in HN, I doubt HN would become considerably more addictive.

I think there needs to be a culture shift. It's already happening among millennial parents where they don't give phones to kids till they're old enough or even 18.

I mean I agree, and folks my age (gen z) do police one another on phone usage at dinner, for example. I just wish there was an easier or better way to expedite this cultural shift.

It kinda reminds me of cigarettes. A similarly addicting thing that largely disappeared in the US when it became unfashionable/shameful. Is there a way to make this happen for phones, I wonder.

It didn't happen with cigarettes until multiple generations and grown up addicted to them.

Sometimes I think… What if this is just human evolution at play? After hunter-gatherers, humans became sedentary farmers and herders. Imagine if psychology was a thing back then. There would have been so many papers on how this shift was changing the very core of what we were.

What if technology is just evolving us into something else? I can imagine in 1000 years from now our cyborg versions would be walking around with screens inside their brains not thinking twice about it.

I don’t think I’d like that world at all. And I hate what screens have done to my current world. But shit, maybe there’s no stopping it.

Well everyone use their branes so much that in the end they are all going to turn into eggs becos they will hav thort a way of getting along without walking. This will not be until 21066 a.d. (approx.) but it makes you think a bit.

—N. Molesworth (1956)

My mom fell for an SMS scam and can‘t recognize obvious AI videos where cats on two legs dance with human babies.

Old people can‘t be left alone with internet devices and online banking.

I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…

> I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…

It's not very nice to call that "being dumb". Imagine that you live for 60 years in a country speaking English, and in a matter of a couple years, most of society switches to Mandarin. You may well struggle learning Mandarin as a 60 years old, and you wouldn't like being called "dumb" by young people who grow up with it.

It's factually accurate; the converse of the Flynn effect (IQ increasing over time), plus the negative effect on intelligence of lead in the paints and fuels that they were exposed to, means that particular generation is on average lower IQ than the younger generations.

I'm not sure I understand your point.

First, older generation having lower IQ than newer is neither the Flynn effect nor its reversal. The Flynn effect compares historical test results to current ones; not old people vs young people but old people when they passed the test long ago with young people passing the test now. If elderly people are loosing IQ points it's most certainly because of age not because they have had a lower IQ all along.

And the reversal of the Flynn effect states that younger people are actually the one having the lower hand on this comparison.

I wonder what this comment says about your IQ.

I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but I have no trouble understanding the idea of SMS scams and fake videos. This is not akin to a foreign language. People who grew up with movies or television are deeply familiar with the idea that things you see in moving pictures may not be real. People who grew up with mail and telephones are familiar with the concept of unseen people trying to trick you to steal your money. It’s not hard to apply these same concepts when the video and text is on a handheld device rather than a box in front of the couch or paper in an envelope.

The ones I know who fall for this stuff the most have always been gullible. They were getting taken by cell phone tower investment scams and anti-vac hoaxes decades ago and the only real change is the medium.

> I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but

Going through such changes when you are in your twenties or when you are in your sixties is extremely different.

An interesting example I have is working with younger software engineers: those who studied and graduated after clouds existed. It has surprised me more than once, with different people and in different contexts, that they had trouble imagining that one may not always have a fast internet connection or access to a cloud.

I wouldn't call them dumb for that, though.

I’m sure it’s harder when you’re older but it’s nothing like learning a foreign language unrelated to your mother tongue.

And my point is that they don’t have to learn anything new to avoid getting scammed. Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake” and “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice. Unless, of course, they never developed those skills and have been getting taken their whole lives, which seems to be pretty common.

My point is that you are being naive, which is ironic given that you claim they are dumb :-).

> Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake”

This is not an existing skill. The existing skill is a life of learning how other people may try to deceive them. But then the baseline shifts faster than they can imagine, and suddenly their skill is useless.

For instance, humans tend to put more trust into eloquent people, because it usually is synonymous with education. Not that it is a perfect rule, but it is a useful one. Or it was, before LLMs. Now suddenly anyone can sound eloquent. It's not just older people: VCs suffer from the exact same problem. CEOs pay way too much to get bullshitted by McKinsey and the others.

> “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice

Don't you give your money to your bank? How do you know they won't leave with your money or that they won't bankrupt next week? Should I call you dumb if you have been unlucky enough to be in one of those banks?

My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless. If you can understand that the spaceships you saw whizzing around in Star Wars on a theater screen weren't real, you can understand that a dancing cat on a phone screen might not be real. Plenty of old people do understand this, so it's not some impossible task, or even one as difficult as learning an extremely difficult foreign language.

Trusting eloquent people just because of how they sound has always been a way to get scammed. Exposure might be higher now, but people who are getting scammed by eloquent SMSes today were probably getting scammed by friendly, educated-sounding people offering "an incredible investment opportunity" or to "help with the ATM" decades ago, or Amway, or chain letters.

My bank doesn't qualify as "strangers." I have an existing business relationship with them. That relationship started when I reached out to them, not vice versa.

> My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless.

But it's not your choice to make.

And really, how many people don't understand why they should use a password manager? Or can't be arsed to learn how to use one? Or don't understand how to parse a link like https://microsoft.updateeleven.com?

Are they dumb or do they lack practice? I bet they lack practice because they don't really give a shit about that. My grandmother is 100, she doesn't spend 6h a day swiping TikTok, and she doesn't grasp the concept of AI-generated videos. But she can knit infinitely better than me. Should she call me dumb because I can't knit?

Because people don't give a shit about stuff you care about doesn't make them dumb. Maybe you don't know much about music, or painting, or dinosaurs, and that does not make you dumb.

I mean surely theyve seen a cat before to know that two legged cats don't dance with babies.

I don't think they're dumb either. But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.

> I mean surely theyve seen a cat before to know that two legged cats don't dance with babies.

They've lived in a world where it was hard to make convincing fake videos, and where it would only be worth doing in contexts like movies or maybe propaganda. Suddenly, photorealistic videos pop up everywhere.

Also I don't know if you've seen a circus before, but animals can do very impressive stuff.

> But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.

Again that's harsch. If we're talking about believing in a video that shows cats doing something that could happen in a circus (I haven't seen the video, but why not), then they are believing in something that does not matter much; it's just fun. There are young people that truly believe that the Earth is flat, I don't know what's worse.

>I don't know what's worse.

It's the same thing entirely: people trusting images and signals from control apparatuses to override the signals from their own senses.

Some form of that has been going on throughout history. Basic socialization involves replacing a part of how you see the world, with a simulation of others' simulation of an imaginary "everyone" expects to see things.

If this sounds weird, that's because it is. And, not only is it difficult to think about, but once you manage to imagine it you may find it viscerally terrifying. So you don't. (It's why you don't remember early childhood.) Granted, none of that has ever happened at this... no, not "scale"! It's never happened at this resolution, i.e. ability to discern.

Machines make decisions billions of times a second along constantly evolving, networked rulesets; consumers are afforded to elect rulemakers once every few years in avoidance of mass tantrum, and otherwise are free to vote with wallets and feet for whichever evil they consider the lesser one. Which one can be said to be in control?

Ultimately, it's not terribly important if the cat dances or what shape the planet is. What matters is whether you will go kill when your phone gives you the "kill" command: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

Two 60ish ladies are sitting in the cafe next to me, one isn't able to figure out where some thing on the phone had arrived from, the other one isn't able to explain to her friend that it came "but from the phone itself!"

Of course, from some slopmonger, data harvester, ad broker, spammer... but they spent their lives without having to learn about the shape of the earth; why would they want to know who makes the phone do things "on its own"?

Why would they want to know that the Free Pleasant Stimulus of the "cat and baby video" is not For Realsies Real? I'm not saying they don't actually need to understand that, but nobody ever tries to explain why would they want to.

Society is mighty and benevolent, one can go through life and even raise kids without ever learning about object permanence. So they do, and when in their sunset years when they ask "who stole the money", society is only happy to provide a culprit for that, too. Remember that very few of the phone scammers want to be there, either.

Nice scenario.

If your mobility is limited physically, what else is there to do other than computer/screen based activities?

Hopefully full dive VR will be ready by the time I'm that old.

Read books, play chess, write letters, knit, sew, DnD, play music, wheel around and chat with others, there’s a lot of solid options. Their environment needs to serve those up in as convenient a manner as a device, not likely, sigh.

It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically.

It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.

YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.

These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.

It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.

Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.

Why YouTube specifically? In my experience it is the tamest of all feeds.

Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.

Youtube is one of those platforms I would probably never have used if my feed wouldn't be adjusted to me.

There is real gold on youtube, like for example the math explainers by 3blue1brown. But if you ever tries opening a private browser window and opening and see the video recommendations it looks like a platform only containing mindless trash, with the mental nutritents contained in a piece of cardboard.

And there are people who like precisely that: Mindnumbing somethings that just keep your brain from having a single thought.

Agreed. YouTube shines with personalized feed, and is unusable without it.

If you’re using it as a tool it’s perfectly usable with just a search bar. I want to learn how to do something in a visual manner, I go to YouTube. Type in “how to replace [part] on [my car]”. All I have on the YouTube homepage is a search bar, because I used the Unhook extension to hide everything else.

Oh, I use YouTube for my hobbies, which are very visual.

Using YouTube (or any video thing) for programming topics drives me nuts, the presenter never goes at my pace.

YouTube recommendations don't work at all for me. YouTube will only recommend to me videos I've already seen. No matter what.

Home page? All videos I've seen. Sidebar? All videos I've seen.

The only way for me to find any new content is literally to search. It makes zero sense.

YouTube recommendations are tailored to what you watch. I end up being recommended car repair videos, security/hacking/surveillance videos, repairing old vintage computers and some like comedy and music stuff I like.

The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.

Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.

And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.

Never fails to amaze me how shortsighted the algorithms can be.

"Oh you didn't skip this video on a topic you usually don't watch? How about we make that topic 50% of your next however many videos?!"

They're not short-sighted; there's science behind it. The science of getting people to waste as much time as possible generating "engagement". All of this is A/B tested to hell and people's careers live and die by it.

Yes, maybe shortsighted is not the right word, but regardless, they misunderstand signal constantly.

I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.

This is an important caveat. I get recommended what the parent commenter you replied to stated, mostly videos on home repair, tech, and technological skepticism because those are what I watch. I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.

I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.

> I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.

That doesn't happen. Firstly you literally click on the video and say "don't recommend channel" and you will never see a JRE episode again.

Also, just by how you phrased that whole paragraph. I don't believe you are telling the truth.

None of those characters are "alt-right". "alt-right" essentially means White Nationalist.

You cannot tell me that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are White Nationalists because of their support for Israel and one of them is Jewish. White nationalists really don't like Israel and Jewish people. They however were labelled as "alt right" to smear them, by other political commentators and publications who are typically on the left and American.

You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.

Also Jordan Peterson actually talked about addiction on a Joe Rogan podcast and it was one of the things that put me on the road to dealing with my drinking issues. I stopped listening to Joe Rogan about episode 1000 after they stopped being live and were prerecorded.

I have plenty of criticisms of them now. But I Jordan Peterson did help me at least indirectly. I don't watch either of them anymore and haven't watched them for quite a number of years at this point.

There are some subtleties here. One of my friends and I are both interested in camping and outdoor gear. This keeps causing YouTube to recommend videos on prepping and guns. Go ahead and block channels and select less of this and it sort of works for a while But then it comes back with more. There are lots of prepping and guns channels. Maybe a pepper who talks about gardens gets highlighted or a gun thing that has a manufacturing complication or business hook comes up. There are many such channels, lots of content, and the connections are very strong, at least with YouTube recommendations.

That happens on car repair vids as well. I like this channel for example:

https://www.youtube.com/c/WatchWesWork

He fixes up a lot of different type of vehicles and actually explains in detail what he is doing. A lot of car stuff is just people like do a dyno test of like suped up car, I don't find it very interesting. I end up just blocking those channels.

I really think that people are nitpicking a system that works reasonably well for the most part.

Rogan, peterson, and shapiro might not like the alt right, but the alt right sure likes them. At which point do they become willing accomplicies?

The alt-right does not like them. You don't know what you are talking about.

For not liking them they sure cannot stop talking about how much they like what they say.

They do not. The alt-right hate Jews or people who support Israel. Ben Shapiro is a Jew, Jordan Peterson supports Israel and used to work for Daily Wire that had a Jewish host. No white nationalist would ever support that.

You are either lying, or have no idea what you are on about.

We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. It's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".

You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.

> We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. t's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".

Firstly. None of that is alt-right. It is America Republican slop rage-bait. Alt-right specifically means White Nationalist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

> The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right), or dissident right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s.

White Nationalists literally hate the Jews, Israel and anyone that support them.

- Ben Shapiro is a Jewish Neocon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism)/

- Jordan Peterson supports Israel and last time I checked worked for the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire was co-founded by Ben Shapiro.

- Joe Rogan is 90s style liberal who is into UFOs, Big Foot and other kooky shit. He literally named his comedy bar "The Mothership". Nothing about that is White Nationalist/Alt-right.

None of them are White Nationalists, nor would they be accepted by White Nationalists. So you are 100% incorrect on that.

Secondly, The Ben Shapiro Ownage stuff was popular circa 2015-2018. Guess what was popular before that? "Hitch Slap", which was Christopher Hitchens basically berating people are various religions.

I've not seen any of that content described in years and it fell out of favour back in 2018-2019.

> You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.

It isn't though.

None of the ownage videos have been popular for years and quite honestly I don't believe you have seen them unless you've specifically gone looking for them.

I have tested whether this does come up on a fresh browser profile using a VPN set to the US (as I am in the UK). I used several different locations in the US. I didn't see one of these videos.

I believe you and others are lying because they have a political axe to grind.

You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly. Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.

A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.

Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.

> You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.

Projection

> You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly.

No I am using the terms correctly. You (from later on in your reply) aren't.

> Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.

These are specific political positions that are held by prominent members. Calling Ben Shapiro a white nationalist is simply idiotic. If you aren't informed about it, maybe you should not make strong claims about it.

> A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.

No they don't. No white nationalist would support the Jews or Israel. I am sorry you are simply showing your ignorance.

As an aside, Fascism is a wildly misunderstood and misused term. I actually loathe ever talking about it today because like the term "Nazi" it has been totally misused by idiots. You do not understand the term fascist.

> Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.

Obviously there are splinter groups in any organisation that believe different things. Those people btw are referred to differently.

> Projection

No at all. I am just calling it as I see it. I also lost any good will I would have had with you in the conversation as a result of this jab.

You make it sound like anti-semites will always dislike Israel as if the average evangelical isn’t an anti-semite. This is why normies who don’t understand politics and over emphasis idpol and labels are always surprised when anti-semites can and do love Israel.

This exact thing goes on in my YouTube sidebar. Let's say I watch a video game streamer. The sidebar will end up consisting of:

- Same streamer, different video

- Different streamer

- Far right pundit blasts immigration

- Video game streamer

- Video game review

- Same streamer, similar content

- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS

- Video game streamer

It's obvious that some slots are simply reserved for whatever YouTube thinks will enrage/engage. Nothing I do seems to stop this. I can click "Don't Show Me This" until I'm exhausted, and next time around, while they might not recommend that exact channel, they just fill these slots with different ragebait. There's no way to say "Don't recommend this shit or anything like it."

I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion from this observation. The realization you should have reached instead is that game streamers are highly aligned with the radical right. Those videos are in there because other viewers sought them out after watching the streams.

Or that the youtube algorithm is leading you toward videos that will maximize their metrics (engagement). Video Games is just the example here but I get the same things from other anodyne hobby videos.

The "gamer to alt-right pipeline"[1] is weirdly real, but what I don't understand is why all these social media companies are trying to funnel gamers as a particular group into extreme right political content, and why is the alt-right targeting gamers in particular? I guess it's possible that gamers tend intentionally seek out this content, so the algorithm matches this energy, but it would surprise me. Why would gamers want this crap?

1: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/05/660642531/right-wing-hate-gro...

I think it's just the overlap between gamers and a desirable younger male voting demographic that helped Trump win in 2024. These guys aren't watching cable news so it seems logical to try and reach them on the internet.

Disaffected male youth almost universally play (or watch people play) video games as their primary form of entertainment.

The point of my comment though, was that it’s not just video game content leading here, it seems to be any male leaning hobby, including weightlifting, sports, tabletop gaming, etc.

You might find this interesting

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-curious-case-o...

When I did this experiment in the browser (different topic, same result) the bait videos were tagged with a little "new"

> Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.

I don't see that at all. I use YouTube most evenings (I watch YouTube instead of TV).

I do have like traditional news media sometimes on the third or fourth row and you can dismiss that quickly.

> And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.

You fix that by simply pressing "Not Interested" a few times. It can be annoying. It isn't the end of the world.

This is not true. I have never seen that at all. I rarely use the YouTube main feed, but looking at it right now, it's 100% bicycle repair and cooking.

The idea that YouTube pushes a political point of view is itself a falsehood pushed by people holding a particular point of view.

I don't know about pushing a certain political point of view, but my 3rd or 4th row of recommendations frequently becomes a labelled "news" section if something big happens either federally or in my state. Separate from normal recommendations.

I am talking about recommendations in the right sidebar of a video.

yeah but then they sometime just emerge some random stuff in your feed, and if you give in to it once and click on it, they will assume this is all you want from now on.

No. You just click "Not Interested" a few times and it they go away.

I've found the opposite to be true. If I engage with a video in any way shape or form, even to say I don't want it, they consider that engagement

I can't get it to stop recommending a video I've already watched...it thinks I want to watch it again I guess.

Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month...

> I've found the opposite to be true. If I engage with a video in any way shape or form, even to say I don't want it, they consider that engagement

I don't think that is the case. If I click Not Interested. Similar video don't show.

> Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month..

To members? Or to YouTube to remove ads? If it is the former, you have shown YouTube that you are willing to pay for memberships, so they going to recommend them.

Remove the offending videos from your history, it helps.

YouTube recommendations are always so rage-baity for me to the point where I blocked them entirely.

Can't look up a movie or a gadget without getting a thumbnail with big red letters saying that the thing sucks, this despite me avoiding review/reaction content like the plague.

“This changes everything”. That title of every third YouTube video has never been true

Or you can try disabling watch histories, assuming that's an issue for you of course

Mirrored at Business Times.

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/meet-real-...

Archive today and even archive.org are not working with safari on this iphone. I'll have to debug.

FWIW, I'm senior, and when you're not 100%, you just sit and read or listen to the radio (preferably classical music). Being a techie and infovore, Hacker News fills the bill. Where else do you get links to WWII proximity fuses (schematic included) or high tech gambling cheat devices. And programming languages, something of interest to me since "Computer Lib: Dream Machines"?

I felt great yesterday and hiked a lot, but some days, the connected screen replaces the ipad over the piano and the camera screen. Screens all over. Grabbed a sunrise this morning before just chillin most of the day.

Is this new? My grandparents spent a ton of time in front of the tv, most of the day probably. By the time some of them were near 90 they couldn't do much more anyway, but I think it started decades before that, especially in winter time after they were retired

It gives a feeling of Screen addiction is when people are looking at things I don't approve of.

Many older people I work with would love to have more required interactions move away from the phone screen.

>Many older people I work with would love to have more required interactions

This was actually a big issue in my office leading to work from home being rolled back. The boomers want to be in the office so other people are forced to socialize with them, and they don’t want to be home because many of them seem to resent their spouses.

IMO it’s a terrible trade-off. What they lack is true relationships and friendships, and they're filling the void with idle workplace chitchat for the illusion of connection. I’d rather be at home. I’m getting paid to work, not provide social support for lonely boomers.

Many older people held the belief that isolation is good and community is for suckers. They move to the suburbs, completely go all-in on their family, and have zero friends.

It's unfortunate, but for a lot of people, their job is all they have.

I know a lot of 20-something’s for whom their job is all they have. Not sure it’s completely an age thing.

It's not completely an age thing but it's heavily associated with age. Young people will also do things like move to the city and be poor just for the hell of it. Or backpack somewhere and be poor because why not. Or spend 2x on rent just to cut their commute by 15 minutes.

Doctors who're legally entrusted to handle addiction care...aren"t. It's a total scandal.

Surely the responsibility here is broader than treating it after the fact? Perhaps it’s an over the top comparison but most places outlaw dangerous drugs— you can treat the after-effects but by that point a lot of the damage has already been done. Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way.

(And like with many of these things, holding senior executives personally liable helps ensure that the fines or whatever are not just waved away as a cost of doing business.)

Yes it is an over the top comparison. I am a recovered / former addict (alcohol). I would never compare the two. I was spending too much time on Twitter a few years ago. I deleted my account. The problem was solved. It took me an entire year to accept that I had a serious problem and then another 9 months to finally stop drinking.

The brewery, the bar nor the bar ever made me drink. I chose to drink. I also was the one that chose to stop drinking. BTW drink is as dangerous or more dangerous as many illegal drugs IMO.

> Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way.

You get recommended what you already watch. Most of my YouTube feed is things like old guys repairing old cars, guys writing a JSON parse in haskell and stuff about how exploits work and some music. That is because that is what I already watched on the platform.

Right, and recommendations for old car repair videos that you watch a few of per week is reasonable.

The argument I’m making is that it’s not beyond the pale for YouTube to detect “hey it’s been over an hour of ai bullshit / political rage bait / thirst traps / whatever, the algorithm is going to intentionally steer you in a different direction for the next little bit.”

They actually do show a several notices that says "Fancy something different, click here". They already have a mechanism in place that does something similar to what you describe.

What YouTube recommends to you is more of what you already watch. Removing stuff the you describe is as easy as clicking "Not interested" or "Do not recommend channel".

Also YouTube algorithm is rewarding watch time these days. So click bait isn't rewarded on platform as much. I actually watch a comedy show where they ridicule many of the click-baiters and they are all complaining about the ad-revenue and reach decreasing.

Also a lot of the political rage-bait is kinda going away. People are growing out of it. YouTube kinda has "metas" where a particular type of content will be super popular for a while and then go away.

I don't agree with this take. Some people are going to be more susceptible than others, just as with alcohol or other drugs. An individual choosing to stop doesn't mean much for society in aggregate.

I don't go down the political rage bait video pipeline, nevertheless next to any unrelated YouTube video I see all sorts of click/rage-bait littered in the sidebar just asking to start me down a rabbit hole.

As an example I opened a math channel/video in a private mode tab. Under it (mobile), alongside the expected math-adjacent recommendations I see things about socialist housing plans, 2025 gold rush debasement trades, the 7-stage empire collapse pattern ("the US is at stage 5"), and so on. So about 10% are unrelated political rage-bait.

Moreover, everyone is seeing different things for different reasons, even geographically. For example I recently discovered this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d.... If you look at exhibit 8A, section 3.5 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366201/dl) you'll see various targeting, e.g. particularly swing states/counties.

Meh. I see this in my own mom, now. But 20 years ago before phones were huge, she already spent an absurd amount of time each day watching soap operas on TV.

My maternal grandparents spent day after day for most of their retirement sitting in front of the TV.

This is true. But it’s also hard to hold against many of them. Because they are often isolated, slow or immobile, and in cognitive decline. I saw this happen to my grandmother in an assisted living home.

People criticize children not realizing they are equally afflicted

I hope more awareness is made about this

I have a lot of elderly friends, from folk music jams. They’re in their 60-80 phase, plenty of money and energy, decent health, minds still in tact. They’re learning new tunes, arresting the decline of technique, interacting in person regularly with others. If every older person did this, their minds would stay a lot sharper for longer. Every day you’re minutely deliberately improving and learning new tunes.

Grab a bodhran or banjo and head to a local folk jam everyone!

Concur. I'm 62. It's jazz for me, but same deal.

Well it helps replace the Young that don't visit.

We need a screenaholics anonymous

I support a couple of retired people on the side, and they are totally addicted to the lowest quality slop on Facebook/Instagram imaginable.

It's so bad that they'll click on a link to see the latest slop, and ostensibly get one of those webpages that says they have 47 viruses and call the number. I politely told them that they shouldn't click on those links anymore.

To which they said, well, if I shut my phone off when that happens, can I keep on doing it?

It's like that Star Trek the Next Generation episode where they all get addicted to that game. It's creepy and sad.

It's fascinating how tech has become a vital part of the elderly's lives, helping them stay connected and informed.

Maybe it's not bad. In post soviet countries elderly already watching government endorsed man-hating gibberish on tv all day long.

So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.

Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.

This goes hand in hand with the resurgence of fascism.

This is also what I think is a driving factor behind American politics today:

> Alarming and misleading news may be a particular threat to the elderly, who are twice as likely as under-25s to use news apps or websites.

Millions of people are addicted to watching Fox News paint a picture of the urban US as a war zone that rural and suburban residents should avoid at all costs. That doesn't even include the right wing AI slop on social media sending similar messages. One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).

i didn't read the original article, but an interesting aspect to the elderly screen addiction is that there's a real imbalance in content consumption vs. content creation.

young folks on social media create a lot content (posts/photos/videos) meant for their peer group to consume, so their feed is a mix of authentic peer-generated content and whatever mass-produced stuff sneaks into their feed.

older folks do not share nearly as much. maybe a text-based facebook comment once in a while. so when they log and consume from their feed, they aren't watching things created by their peers -- they're seeing content that professionals created for the purpose of broadcast.

It's not just Fox News, and it's not just the right-wing. That's something that you've absorbed from a screen.

My black, middle-class, Democratic-voting father and stepmother who certainly were alive during the early 90s (when I was a teenager and actually on the south side Chicago streets, in danger) think that crime is higher than ever before. Democrats have absolutely spent most of their time trying to convince them that it definitely is, except when targeting Republicans, or trying to defend terrible mayors.

Tough on crime is almost the only thing second-term Democratic presidents run on. Focusing on crime, at whatever level, is always a suitable distraction for the dumb middle-class (R or D). The only thing that comes in second is focusing on poor people's diets. There will always be crime, and always be people eating badly; and are you pro-crime and pro-junk food on your dime?

> One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).

More than argue. It's not just him, though, it's completely out of touch wealthy people who think of politics as a hobby, and are constantly bombarded with local news that consists entirely of crimes. There's no concept that the fact that they heard about 2 murders and 10 robberies today within a metro area of 10 million people doesn't give them any understanding at all of current crime prevalence. Or that they hear about street crimes, but don't hear about domestic ones. Or hear about violence but don't hear about financial crimes.

They've all got a story of somebody they know who was affected by street crime, too. One incident that a hundred people get to cite.

Trump also is just consciously playing middle-class dimwits like everyone else.

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