A few years ago I listened to a TED talk by Keith Chen, which was focused on the research highlighted in this article. It made a lot of sense to me, that the language constructs which you have and which you use would affect your behavior and how you think about things. Thank you for this article, as it highlights a bunch more research in a subject I haven’t seen much about in some time. I find small quirks in thinking like this quite fascinating and I’m happy to have a new book to read 😄

Their hobbies likely aren’t causing them to have negative feelings, whereas their work more likely is. Humans are somewhat biased towards needing to vent and talk about issues which cause them negative feelings that they have to do.

People also talk about work for a variety of social reasons. Most importantly, perhaps, is that people often measure social standing by their work. Where they work, what jobs they have, how much money they make, and other characteristics of work are important for many human social evaluations. Because this is important, it becomes socialized as something that you should discuss, and thus becomes a common topic of conversation. People then internalize it as something they should talk about, or is interesting to talk about. It’s a self sustaining model built upon the foundations of social worth and evaluation, supported by the emotional needs of humans.

Interestingly you’ll see that in certain circles where social worth is not derived from your work (minorities in which upwards mobility or potential jobs are limited often talk less about work) but from other aspects of your life (talking about children is a favorite for those who have them and artists love to talk about their creative pursuits) that you’ll find conversation drifting towards different topics instead.

I think the best thing you can do, if you find this boring, is to attempt to redirect conversation away from work and towards something you’d rather talk about. People will naturally drift back towards conversation that they find useful, interesting, or have been socialized to do and ultimately you may need to tolerate this or find a group of friends less interested in talking about their career. I’ve generally found that quips which highlight it’s silly to be talking about work away from work (such as when participating in work offsite trips) or highlight how work is just a means to make money and I’m disinterested in talking about capitalism and would rather know the person and what they find interesting tend to work well to divert conversation away from chatting about work.

soulseek

Tell that to people unwilling to leave twitter because they are struggling to find content on mastodon. The major benefit of big social media companies is typically that they provide an algorithm to content that people find interesting by paying an invasive amount of attention to what you do on their websites and how you interact with content.

While not everyone is as interested in an algorithms idea of what we would like to see or content we would enjoy, to ignore that many people out there are very interested or to paint it as purely a means of advertisement ignores why some humans are still on these platforms and the source of their attraction.

I think you brought up a fantastic point and one that did not line up with my expectations either, so thank you for surfacing the question so that others can see. 😊

Unfortunately this is somewhere in medicine where you will see a lot of discrimination if you do not currently have children and attempt to access this route of birth control. Women are more likely to experience this kind of discrimination when pursuing healthcare that limits child bearing capabilities in the future. Perhaps men pursuing more permanent options will make the system relax a bit when it comes to push-back when pursing certain kinds of care.

I also wonder whether it’ll spur legislators to fast track options which have been under development for a long time such as RISUG. I know the ability to make babies is an important platform for conservatives, so seeing men pursue options that they haven’t made illegal might spur them to action… or they might just ban vasectomies or something idk

The way this is reported on, and what precisely each number means are things you should investigate when they do not line up with your expectations. This chart comes from this data brief. In the definitions the following is stated (emphasis mine):

In this report, as in prior NSFG reports (3), women who were currently using more than one method are classified by the method that was most effective in preventing pregnancy, because that method has the greatest impact on their risk of unintended pregnancy. For example, women who report using both oral contraceptive pills and male condoms in the current month are classified as using pills, because pills are more effective at preventing a pregnancy.

oh no, pressuring advertisers by speaking to them is destroying free speech

Not just that, they’re often way less nutritionally useful. Nearly all alternative milks have very low protein content. It would be trivially cheap to add in a small amount of whey protein or use less sugar, but for some reason I haven’t been able to find a brand that does. At most they focus on making it analogous to milk when it comes to frothing for coffee…

Pretty much everything cited here more or less doesn’t acknowledge the influence of digital replacements for in-person ones. A good example of how this is poorly framed interpretation of science, is to look at modern science focused on collaboration. Without spending too much time going into the details, here’s two papers that I think frame some of the high level ideas reasonably well. Measuring human to human interaction is a complicated science and humans are often more adaptable than people think.

When organizations first dealt with the idea of open offices and how tech was changing collaboration, much of this science began to really hit the mainstream. Technically speaking, this field has existed for a much longer period of time, but the widespread adoption of the ability to chat online really pushed us into a new style of communication (you also see some very interesting papers on this back when the telephone caught on and how that replaced in-person interaction). Modern practices in the science help to understand how/when people prefer to interact with each other with a focus on optimizing collaboration in a corporate environment, but some papers focus in on the quality of the interaction - the latter has seen a huge surge in literature since the COVID-19 pandemic as more people were forced to interact at a distance, rather than in person.

I think as a whole we’re only barely beginning to understand the affects and effects of digital socialization on a human, and I would caution against making broad statements on, well, just about anything at this point. While one can easily point to some of these negative outcomes such as an increase in the rates of depression, one can similarly say the same of any mental illness as we are also getting much better at recognizing mental health issues, de-stigmatizing the treatment of mental health, and are currently existing during a period of wealth consolidation the world has not seen for at least a century. We could also just as easily point towards other indicators of health and wellness which have been rising, how the younger generation is more tolerant and diverse than we’ve previously seen, is more ecologically conscious, more aware of the issues with capitalism, more connected than ever, interacts with a more diverse set of people (there’s probably a decent study or two out there that looks at how questions about “friendship” could be updated to reflect a uniquely online world), and other positive outcomes which were not cherry picked when writing this article.

Of course this is not to say that there aren’t also downsides to differing forms of communication - I suspect how much a certain person vibes with in person contact, over the phone contact, video contact, voice contact, text contact, and other mixes of digital communication modalities will vary significantly from person to person. It is vitally important to highlight the ways in which our change in interaction modalities have an effect on our health and well-being, but we also need to be careful about jumping to conclusions which are not supported by the data. For a long time I used to identify as an introvert because society used to define introversion as staying at home in your room all day or interacting with a computer, which I did a lot as a child, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that narrative doesn’t make sense when the time you spend in your room or on a computer was spent interacting with people. This jump in logic is a subtle one, but analogous to what’s going on with this author and often happening when people unfamiliar with human interaction science attempt to interpret data without expertise.

That enables companies like this to take advantage of troves of information to set prices while leaving individuals and families struggling to keep up.

Even if individuals had access to this information, it’s being set by a single source. If companies are unwilling to adjust prices to meet demand, and simply set it to what a single source says they should, what leverage do individuals truly have? How many of the individuals will have the time and energy to investigate the source? Once they investigate the source, what actions can they take?

One might make the argument that they can simply not purchase the service, but is this realistic for something like housing? Would you rather be homeless or pay more than you’re comfortable paying? When a company is gigantic enough to survive a significant period of time where they aren’t making profits or has enough holdings that they can float some empty units in order to make more profits int he long term, what levers can affect the way the company operates if they are secure in knowing that no one else will undercut their prices?

At the end of the day what’s lost on these free market fundamentalists is that supply and demand are concepts to describe a **free ** market. If the market is dominated by a single interest, it is by definition not a free market. As you rightly mentioned, most of the time nowadays, larger interests tend to be on the seller/supply side and they have an imbalanced power dynamic with consumers/demand side. This imbalance leads to a market not being a free market, and fundamentalists tend to ignore a nuanced take on power.

I mean, entirely unsurprising, but I’m glad I wasn’t the only one with this thought when that story broke.

It’s not just libertarians, it’s extremists in any direction, really. Rules are about a sense of stability and safety in a community. This leads to two kinds of ideologies, both of which are often at play on some level.

The first ideology and in my opinion the most important one is an ideology which sets rules designed to protect the members of the community based on ideas which are shared across the entire community (or close enough to the entire community). Ideas like “don’t kill people for no reason” are pretty universally human, protect human communities pretty well, and in general are not controversial. Other ideas such as protections for minority groups within a community may garner a bit more controversy from some, depending on how ostracized the minority groups are and how they contribute (or damage) the community. On the internet this manifests with rules which are pretty universally accepted such as no posting of child pornography

The second ideology is one of setting rules via populism or trending towards the average opinion. There are both good and bad rules which sit in this category and a lot of it depends on how the rule is framed or what it is intending to do. Rules which enforce social norms, such as “girls must wear dresses”, tend to do a lot more harm than rules which might aim to protect well-accepted ideas which face some controversy but are not quite at the level of universal acceptance such as “gays and interracial couples can marry”. These kind of rules on the internet typically resemble “free speech is protected” on the permissive end and “transphobia is not allowed” on the protective end.

However, as you mentioned, rules are not just what is explicitly written and codified. Rules are also reflective of how the community treats people. You don’t need to have a law which says “no black people” in a rural community in America with deep-seated racist issues - this kind of behavior is simply reinforced by the peers in a community when they condone or condemn behavior they witness, by the conversations they have, and how they act around people from within and outside the community who push back against these unwritten rules. The core principle of Beehaw is formed around providing a framework which is designed to support the latter, with a focus on curating a community which represents a particular set of ideals designed to be protective and supportive, as it’s a kind of community we haven’t seen often online and a community which we wished to participate in.

I remember when congress “investigated” big oil for making record profits during the last recession

big whole lot of nothing came of that, I remember thinking ‘well that can’t be good for the rest of capitalism’… and here we are. Cat’s out of the bag, government doesn’t want to do anything about it.

Absolutely absurd that something like this can exist and it’s not considered price fixing

To be clear I wasn’t suggesting it should happen without a transparent log (and a very visible one, not one that’s hidden in the modlog) that it happened, such as by having the original title in small text and the moderator who changed the title attached to the new title. This was mostly a use-case to keep things clear and understandable. As it is someone could post a lot of relevant links and just title them all “Article” for example or “Read this” and it wouldn’t be particularly useful and just leads to a lot of moderator cleanup.

I would perfectly be okay with the original title being displayed somewhere and an indicator that a moderator changed the title. If this is something you don’t want to allow, I understand. To be clear, the situation I’m describing is where someone decided to post an article with a modified title which happened to be kinda clickbait-y but mostly just removed any context of what the article was until you clicked into the post where you can see the linked pages title/heading.

From a user perspective, they may not be particularly responsive. If I remove a post after replying to it, how does a user experience this? Will they be notified their post is removed? Will they get my reply in their message box? If they edit their title and I wish to reinstate the post, is there an easy way to do so, and how would this affect sorting if it took say, 2 days for the user to respond?

There’s a lot of legitimate reasons to re-title a poorly titled post. While I can just remove anything that crosses the line, my guess is the user experience of this kind of behavior would be undesirable. In this case I liked the linked article, but the title of the post made it very unclear what the article was about. I don’t want to have to iterate a bunch of rules, either, to help explain the thought process of why an article being re-titled to be extremely clickbait-y might warrant a moderator action but another post in which someone didn’t match the article title perfectly was fine.

Just came to post this from AP, lol.

First time I’ve seen real damages (an appropriate amount). Of important note this is just the compensatory damages, not the punitive ones.

As someone who was on computers being social from a very young age, I really don’t get why there’s so much push back on the smartphone, rather than setting healthy boundaries and having important discussions with children. As the article states, there’s basically no correlation of smartphone use with just about anything, except a lower life satisfaction score one year after high use of social media in a longitudinal study, but this probably holds true for many adults as well.

To me it seems like the big factors here is that a parent needs to be involved with their child’s use of a smartphone and involved in their child’s life in a way that many people aren’t nowadays. You need to be having regular conversations about the kids emotional state, how they perceive the world, some kinda check-in system to proactively identify where problems might arise and how to navigate complicated concepts with regards to socialization, mental health, and well-being.

I also think the article points out something important, and certainly relevant in my life. I couldn’t wait to grow up because as a child, no one listened to me, my concerns, my needs, my wants, and they were incredibly hypocritical about what I was allowed to do and not do

“Children hate hypocrisy,” says Livingstone. “They hate feeling they’re being told off for something that their parents do, like using the phone at mealtimes or going to bed with a phone.”

I think many parents take the lazy approach of not explaining adult concepts to their children and simply walling them off from experiencing the world. While some children might ultimately be okay with this, it doesn’t work for everyone and I don’t think it’s the right way to treat children.

Zero teeth on that pledge, sell to any police department, government, or government contractor and they’ll simply figure out how to attach weaponry. They don’t even pledge to not sell to weapons manufacturers, they state

“when possible” they said they will review customers’ plans in hopes of avoiding those who would turn the robots into weapons

But honestly anyone who didn’t see this coming even before there were these drone dogs really hasn’t been paying attention. Of course they’re going to be turned into weapons.