Desafinado

That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.

Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.

When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.

Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.

Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.

Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.

My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.

For the most part I'm keeping them away from addictive technology and in the real world, with the hope that they learn social and language skills.

The idea being that social and linguistic skills are the most common attribute among successful people.

In today's world corporations and untested technology are the main dangers to your kid.

Not really, that's kind of my point. A lot of pop non-fiction takes a few, minor commercial ideas that could be an essay and stretches them out into a book with a lot of fluff.

Academic books will literally change the way you view the world in fundamental ways, they go beyond the digests you mention.

I don't see how, in the scenario I mentioned, that just allowing a user to click away from a modal is a problem, though. Are they not losing value from alienating users who they do stuff like this to? Are they really gaining any value by forcing them to follow accounts they don't want to follow?

It just sounds like they have no better ideas to me. Why not just make the feature human and build a little bit of customer loyalty? That's kind of my point. After a while people get so tired of this crap this might be why these users provide Meta no value.

And I guess, if they're already making ridiculous profits, why not just accept that some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network at all.

Right, I think everyone gets that, but clearly treating the actual users of their applications as products isn't working and hasn't worked, as evidenced by most people abandoning those applications

But maybe it's too late in the game for them anyway. Even if they tried to build a more engaging product the trust the public has in them has vanished, and few tech savvy users would care.

The alternative I'm suggesting though would be a design that attracts people to and sustains the product. But they likely needed to do this fifteen years ago while also avoiding all of their scandals.

Every minor dehumanizing decision they make chips away at their credibility among all but the dumbest people. Those people may stay because Meta has their contact list, but after a while absolutely nobody is going to be loyal to them. Being human sometimes goes a long way.

"leaning in fully to parenthood"

Hang out with your kid.

If you want truly, truly heavy and thought-provoking you need to get away from brick-and-mortar bookstore, commercial, non-fiction, and get into work that's produced within and for academia.

For example, I've learned more from Anthony Giddens, Crawford Young, and Peter Berger in a handful of books than almost everything I've learned from pop books combined. The real stuff you want to read is in academia and fairly hidden from public view.

I think they are bad decisions despite the economics of it, though. Maybe they're good for Zuck and execs in that they're squeezing every ounce of remaining life from the company before it dies. But they don't seem to have much of a coherent plan in making their products actually enjoyable for real people. It's always the path of least resistance, automated crap, or safe but dumb decisions.

Google and Amazon strike me as companies who build good products. Meta does not, despite it being the 'free' internet.

I would genuinely like to know why I'm wrong and these decisions aren't as bad as they seem.

Curious, do you know that this is the answer or is it a guess?

The world is going to be underwater in a couple decades and we're fighting the world's biggest companies from eviscerating children's public education. It's not looking good.

If there's any lesson to come from this (ha, learning) it's that we need to stop venerating successful business people. It turns out they're just people who like money and don't think about the consequences of their actions.

My wife and I don't drink caffeine anymore but still have a swiss water decaf coffee every morning.

The caffeine aspect is completely unnecessary, but coffee still tastes good, warm drinks are still nice. It's all the ritual.

Posted on Jonathan Haidt's Substack today. Please share widely to friends and family with children using Meta platforms.

Save 2000 dollars (two computers) by using free, lightning fast software that will keep my hardware alive for another decade. Or buy new hardware that Microsoft is going to brick in three years, and will have poor performance the whole time. Tough decision.

Microsoft is tech support for non tech-savvy users at this point.

That's not really like-to-like, though. Forums come with an up-front caveat that you can't remove content. It's not in the fine print, it's how forums work. If people could just delete content the whole premise of forums wouldn't work.

With Meta, obvious anti-human decisions are being made that explicitly hurt people.

It's alarming how many blatantly anti-human features they've deployed. The one that gets me is arbitrarily restricting users from deactivating their Instagram account. You can only deactivate your account a week after re-activating it.

Why? Because some sociopathic moron thought that was a good idea, instead of just letting users access a feature.

How toxic must their corporate culture be to get this bad?

I wasn't really thinking of forums when I made that comment. TV, movies, short form video, journalism. Youtube has merit but compared to books the level of quality isn't even close.

Finding the right forum is exactly how you find good books.

I read books all the time, every day. I don't watch TV, I don't use Youtube much, most of my activity online is reading.

I disagree that you 'need to build the habit of reading to improve your cognitive skills'. There is nothing inherently healthy about reading, I know plenty of people who've been reading fiction for their entire lives and they aren't more informed than people not reading books.

The reason you should read books is because if you look hard enough for good books, the content you can find in them is more interesting, more relevant, more engaging than almost any other form of media. I read books all the time because every other form of media is trash, because they teach me esoteric things about the world around me, that you can't get from Ted Talks or other superficial forms of media. But the interest has to be there, if you aren't interested in engaging, intellectual content then just stick to Youtube and be happy.

Just imagine having to be the face of this company. Imagine telling your own kids this is how you made your fortune.

That's not worth all the money in the world.

It isn't so much about the smartphone replacing family as it is about phones giving us something to do in our homes in lieu of the presence of other people.

Even a family that lives close to each other is separated in space by different homes and will often find themselves alone. But their situation will be much better than someone with no family around. They have the option to see each other, many don't.

I think the more detailed point is that we're largely atomized these days into separate physical spaces where we're often alone, or confined to a small number of people. Smartphones and computers make it a hell of a lot easier to break through that problem.

It's not a competition between eras to see which is worse, my point is only that smartphones fill a need for isolated adults. That can be true and they can still pose a problem for teenagers, it's two separate issues.

I find most of the debate on smartphone use tends to fall on the extreme. Why not find a happy middle ground and recognize that they do have valid uses?

The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.

Some of my relatives in the 90s, things weren't much better without smartphones. You had long distance calling and TV, or otherwise you were alone. One of my relatives attempted suicide when she was very young, you can guess why.

But yes, it obviously makes sense to use smartphones intelligently. Meta products and Tik Tok are poison for the mind. And unless you're at home it's a good idea to just shut the smartphone off.

This. I was waiting to find this post. In addition, there's the reality that it takes a reasonably long tenure to even know what quality looks like. And some engineers lack the skill to get there at all.

They have to work harder at school because they're competing with a higher density of kids. Students in Asia are under intense pressure to perform at school because lack of success often means a life of misery.

By comparison other races / cultures don't really have the same pressure.

Github repos and Workflowy

Intermittent fasting. For several months I didn't eat until about 10 or 11 am. Combined with a reasonable amount of exercise and healthy diet. That's the easiest way to have your calories in less than your calories out.

Nothing is stopping me from starting my side project because I genuinely enjoy working on it. But the side project has nothing to do with software or financial incentives.

If you're having trouble starting a side project it may be because you don't actually want to work on it.

How old is your kid? I don't see why they'd have much interest in a command line interface or have any need to learn how to use one that young.

Install Linux Mint, download GCompris. It'll teach your kid how to learn the mouse and keyboard in a minimally stimulating way.

You do need to delineate between the end goals of promotion and job security, though.

If your only goal is to make money and be promoted then yes, politics are necessary. But that developer who is doing all of the work on the bottom rung and who is required for the team to operate, they often have power and job security. They're kept where they are, and are secure, because of their skills.

That might not be true of a Meta who has billions of dollars to throw at devs. But for companies with a hard time recruiting being good means power.

The old adage goes that there are two people with power in the software industry: those signing the cheques and those writing the code.

This might be true in companies with awful, cut throat cultures, but it's far from ubiquitous across the industry and worldwide. Meritocracy in software is very real and being good often helps politically. That's just less true for the big companies where you're just a number.