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Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

ref: "the new tobacco"

this last year i'm seeing very concerning behavior in students in the 14-20 range. complete addiction to their phones. very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed. similar to how when i started noticing anime girlfriends/waifus in 2016.

about 40% are deep in discord communities where i literally cannot figure out a single sentence of what they're talking about.

if society doesn't do something, and soon, say goodbye to the cognitive ability of a large chunk of future generations.

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> very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed ... say goodbye to the cognitive ability of a large chunk of future generations

I would think very deep interests in niche or obscure topics is correlated with increased cognitive ability, not a decrease.

anime waifus?

> very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed

That's just a symptom of getting old. Young people always find stuff that baffles adults. When I was a teenager, Anime itself was like this - just being "into" anime was considered some kind of bizarre, obscure affectation by adults.

I think smartphones present real challenges (and I don't get how/why they're allowed in schools), but a lot of what you're describing is normal.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

- Sir Humphrey Applebee, 1773.

> very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed

as one of said students, I would just call these hobbies!

> about 40% are deep in discord communities where i literally cannot figure out a single sentence of what they're talking about.

I feel like the same could be said of an at the time adult looking at my IRC or MSN Messenger logs from when I was a teen.

Got some example words or phrases? When I hear stuff like this I'm curious how much is just your standard "out of touch adult" stuff and how much is genuinely bizarre niche rabbitholes.

If by "society" you mean the state, I disagree.

The world is changing quickly, and many people may run into problems, but I'd rather let cultural solutions to these problems naturally arise. Relying on a government to impose top-down solutions on these complicated and poorly understood problems is a recipe for a disaster of unintended consequences.

Is this an "old man yells at cloud" impersonation?

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