I have bad news for you: for the majority of the population mental effort was always a foreign concept. That's exactly what got us in this mess in the first place.
You have extremely intelligent and influential people balking at, say, the undeniable net benefits of universal healthcare, renewable energy investment, and cash payment UBI.
Worse, they use their intelligence to attack interventions that run against their preconceived notions. Milton Friedman was not an idiot, and yet he and his acolytes did (and do) untold damage in anti-intellectual perpetuation of their outmoded ideas.
The common thread between that and skipping conversation for Netflix is disengagement with cognitive load that doesn't immediately benefit you. They both suck, but I think that one hurts more, and hurts more.
Surely that much ought to be clear if you give it a little more thought, no pun intended.
The research is clear that most of the negative effects that most expect cash payment UBI to have don't ever actually appear. Employment goes up (except where recipients use the flexibility to return to school), productivity goes up; the money doesn't get "wasted" on drugs, and it doesn't pump landlord pockets. Giving people the money necessary to participate in the economy increases participation in the economy.
You're assuming you already know what my objections are and defending against them, when I haven't even said anything specific. Now _that_ is anti-intellectual.
The research isn't clear. It's near impossible to model the effect of UBI on the population at large by running a study with N people who know they're going back to normal at the end of the study.
Many have attempted to "give people money" before. It has invariably failed and resulted in inflation.
If you have objections that weren't among the ones stated earlier, you can state them now. If you think that there are better examples of the results likely to be produced by a non-pilot UBI program, you should detail their circumstances and how they're more applicable than the pilot programs, instead of waving vaguely at instances where "many have attempted to 'give people money' before", as if that's a panacea. Because it's not; it's precisely the vibes-based anti-intellectualism I spoke of.
The issue is that you probably can't, because UBI's efficacious nature has been proven rigorously. It would be nice if we could just get on with implementing it.
The rest of us dolts are grateful for your attention to this matter.
Now can you focus some expert thinking on world peace?
Reading about a celebrity breakup in a gossip magazine requires more cognitive effort than hearing about the same breakup in a gossip TikTok:
-You consumed the thing for minutes at a time vs. seconds at a time and your brain had to actively decipher something, not just passively perceive.
-You had to read and couldn't do it while also doing something else, which meant you were more focused.
-You couldn't swipe in a split-second and have another equally stimulating thing that might be completely different, which meant you were more intentional about your mental context.
The medium in which we consume something absolutely matters, independent of what we decide to consume.