[FRIAM] screens & social media

[glen]

Agreed. And the point about social pressure is crucial, I think. Renee's granddaughter is visiting. She decided to look for my criminal record on the internet, which I enthusiastically encouraged. She found all the details you might expect data brokers to sell. (She didn't find my criminal record, luckily.) But it was a fantastic foil for talking about the difference between one's persona versus one's living self.

The kids these days share WAY more information than the old farts can imagine. Their networks are huge, *uncountable* I'd argue ... maybe "uncountable". (IDK how to use words anymore.) Social pressure is different, not merely in degree. E.g. QAA humanized [this guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrick_Brennan) in a [recent podcast](https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/the-life-of-fredrick-brennan). I admit I would never have done that, despite my apparent willingness to explore some pretty dark corners of the world. Some stuff just grosses me out. But we need spelunkers to crawl around in those dark places to help us circumscribe pustulant caverns like 8chan and 4chan, to understand "social pressure" given our new landscape of phenomena like the manosphere, etc.

In that context, Haidt et al seem so childlike, so innocent in their pure ivory tower. I get that same feeling of innocence when Nick uses the word _troll_ ... ["We have such sights to show you!"](https://youtu.be/lKfupO4ZzPs?si=FRIoMdhzTs6GJHPB)

On 3/30/26 9:55 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> re: kids drinking in Europe. Alcoholism , the disease, is only marginally less prevalent in Europe than the US and has nothing to do with early social drinking.  What is easily demonstrated: teens exhibit almost none of the binge drinking that is so obvious here. When they are home. Take a teen from Spain to Amsterdam and they would be pretty much indistinguishable from an American teen. The two summers I took students from New Mexico to Spain and they could legally drink, the majority got fall down drunk the first night out but never afterward because of the social pressure of their Spanish peers. My anecdotal evidence is supported by multiple ethnographic studies.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026, at 8:31 AM, glen wrote:
>> I was waiting for a 3rd stimulus. Maybe the complementarity of
>> definedness and empiricism can be the third stimulus? Anyway, after
>> listening to this:
>>
>> Moral Entrepreneurs, Measurement Issues, & Screentime with Andrew
>> Przybylski
>> https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/decoding-academia-moral-entrepreneurs-measurement-issues-screentime-with-andrew-przybylski-patreon-preview
>>
>> And reading this:
>>
>> Jonathan Haidt Promoted a Fringe Theory on Trans Youth
>> https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs
>>
>> I asked some steadily less sycophantic LLMs to help me understand
>> what's going wrong. To me the most important artificial content they
>> tossed at me was (from Claude): "Advocacy laundered as science.
>> Przybylski and others argue the deeper problem is the posture - Haidt
>> presents a high-confidence causal narrative to policymakers, media, and
>> the public, in a domain where the honest scientific answer is 'the
>> evidence is genuinely mixed and uncertain.'"
>>
>> But what choice do we have? Isn't it *necessary* to dumb down,
>> hyper-partisanize, knead into (false) narrative, in order to get our
>> excluded-middle-broken democracy to do *anything*? If we ascribe (which
>> I think I mostly do) to an interventionist epistemology, we must act in
>> order to understand. No action means no understanding. So, sure,
>> Haidt's imputation of scientific credibility into ROGD is bad, if not
>> an indicator of his underlying reactionary "heterodox" posture. But we
>> can choose to take his other stuff in good faith and suggest that a
>> political action like limiting screen time for youth is an OK
>> exploratory intervention that may lead to a finer grained understanding
>> of their impact in the future. (Yes, given the way law - our law,
>> anyway - works. Once it's written, it's difficult to overturn. But
>> maybe that need not be the case.) The trick is how/whether to consider
>> the would-be counterfactuals. If we implement them, what
>> capabilities/trends will fail to obtain if/when we impose such
>> regulations? Will the kids be less facile with the tech? Less prepared
>> for the future? Less able to self-regulate their responses to the tech?
>>
>> Being a relatively heavy drinker, I often hear the (empirically
>> unjustified) claims from my fellow drinkers that many places in Eurpoe
>> allow youth to drink, thereby providing them with resiliency and a
>> better immune system for alcoholism. I think their claims are flat out
>> false ... despite my desire to believe it. I'm worried I have a similar
>> bias, here. Let the kids have all the "screens" they want. Who are we
>> to prescribe such things? Same goes with AI. So while its arrogant to
>> regulate, it's also arrogant to not regulate until "all the data's in".
>> [sigh]


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