Does the evidence actually say anything about social media bans helping? Because these bans aren't really based on anything other than vibes. The proponents are the same people who will say that social media has rotted the brains of kids and reduced their attention spans. Their evidence for that? Someone else said so. That someone else said so, because
1. Microsoft research saw that people spend less time on a website (less time to see an ad) in the modern day compared to a decade prior
2. knowledge workers now spend less time before they look away from a screen when composing an email
From this somehow we've concluded that kids have shorter attention spans today. And the obvious 'culprit' is social media.
Evidence is optional. It's all about vibes. It feels right to ban social media, so we're gonna do it. If the "researchers" get it wrong it doesn't matter, because there will be no consequences for them.
Also how else do you get evidence on them working if nobody else has done a ban. Why does you have to wait for someone else to do it before you do it for your own country.
And where would you put "billions of people now have access to better translations on demand"?
People talk about business as though only the owners of the business benefit. Everybody else pays the price. But aren't the main beneficiaries all the people using these services?
> billions of people now have access to better translations on deman
As a German speaker, I experience the quality of German language technical documentation steadily declining. 30 years ago, German documentation was usually top notch. With the first machine translations, quality went notably down. Now, with LLM translation, it's often garbage with phrases of obvious nonsense in it.
This is especially true with large companies like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.
I guess the situation is better for languages where translations only became available with LLM.
Are you saying that somebody took translations that had already been written and replaced them with AI generated worse translations? That has got to be a rare exception, no?
But more to your point: you might not have run into languages that didn't have proper translations available, but billions of other people did. In the past I read a machine translated book before. It was almost like a derivative work because it would randomly differ by a huge amount from the source material.
>In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power.
I don't think that's true, not for random goods. Rent scales with disposable income. If most people make more money, then rent becomes more expensive. Rent essentially vacuums up all the excess money people have available. (Rent = housing in this case)
Why would people want to live in these more expensive places rather than somewhere cheaper? It's because that's where all the (well-paying) jobs are.
When you see Americans complaining about how poor they are you might reasonably ask: okay, but how do people on $poorCountry get by when their income is 5-10x less? It's not like food, clothing, electronics, and other goods are 5-10x cheaper there. But what is much cheaper is housing. (You'll even find cheap housing in rich countries, it'll just be in areas with no jobs.)
I think the main "culprit" is energy. Europe has had expensive energy prices for decades. Even poor countries in Europe pay 2-3x more for gasoline than Americans do (because of taxes - The EU requires a minimum of $1.47 of excise taxes per gallon of gasoline). I think these energy prices compound to a lot of manufacturing and business not manifesting in Europe.
All the other stuff matters too, but it's crazy to think that paying 2-3x more for fuel wouldn't show up as a negative influence on the economy somewhere. This is particularly the case because Europe didn't go heavily into nuclear and it is one of the worse places for solar power.
Can someone link me something that shows that attention spans are decreasing?
I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims.
1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)).
This seems BS.
2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently.
This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
They kind of are the only options. All of these issues are sitting on a slippery slope. If you accept a technical solution that works well, then eventually somebody is going to push that further.
If you need to use your ID to log into a website (even if the website doesn't get any of your information) then society is only a step away from the government monitoring everything you do online. And at that point it's up to them to decide whether they want to do it or not, because you're already used to the process. If they decide to violate your privacy there's nothing you can do about it other than vaguely point at privacy laws before promptly getting ignored.
Every generation seems to pick their moral panic and then engages in "unintentional concern trolling" over it. The people mean well, but low quality evidence shouldn't be good enough to condemn things.
Indeed. The question is, how good is the evidence?
Serious question, given it kinda feels like Meta's been acting like cigarette companies back in their heyday, while X is acting like it's the plot device of a James Bond villain.
I stopped engaging in such discussions. There are some people who are reasonable and make sense, but the rest are just outright batshit crazy. They want more restraints, more censorship, more anti-privacy crap? Or they equate "good" with addictive? Come on.
The figures are a bit misleading. First you've got to understand what food security is:
>"at the household level, food security is defined as access to food that is adequate in terms of quality, quantity, safety and cultural acceptability for all household members." (Gillespie, and Mason, 1991).[0]
These potatoes being given away might not meet all the criteria for food security either. Eg they might not have all the things that are considered a nutritious meal (but I'm unsure).
Second, the website might say "1 in 7 people face daily challenges", but it's probably based on this stat:
>An estimated 86.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2024, with access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (13.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year.
Ie for the vast majority of these people it's not a daily thing, but something that happens sometimes (but even sometimes is too much imo).
And from the report summary:
>Children are usually shielded from the conditions that characterize very low food security. However, in 2024, children, along with adults, experienced instances of very low food security in 0.9 percent of households with children, statistically similar to the 1.0 percent in both 2023 and 2022. These 318,000 households with very low food security among children reported that, at times in 2024, children were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.
I'm not saying food insecurity isn't a thing, but these headlines often paint a different picture than what's really happening.
That said, perhaps the reason why food insecurity is relatively low is because these advocacies say what they say. Food security is a bit like server up-time - it's relatively easy to get 99% uptime, but getting to 99.999% uptime is very hard. With food security the numbers are lower though - relatively easy to get 80-90% food security in a developed country but the last 10% are very hard (or at least that's what it seems to me).
Thank you. I have to admit I did not take time to real all. I was just shocked by the 1 in 5. I kinda suspected is not the same definition of poverty and malnutrition in the 1st and 3rd world (I lived in both and know there are big differences) but is still was shocking high. But as you point out, is little more nuanced, and I will not keep the 20% figure in my head.
Yeah, not great... I often skip meals on days that I don't work, to save on food and money, though I don't save much, since I mostly just eat rice and tuna, but I get by.
1. Microsoft research saw that people spend less time on a website (less time to see an ad) in the modern day compared to a decade prior
2. knowledge workers now spend less time before they look away from a screen when composing an email
From this somehow we've concluded that kids have shorter attention spans today. And the obvious 'culprit' is social media.
Evidence is optional. It's all about vibes. It feels right to ban social media, so we're gonna do it. If the "researchers" get it wrong it doesn't matter, because there will be no consequences for them.
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