The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
Yes, there are a lot of people who wants it backwards due to their own experiences.
That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.
The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.
And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.
Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.
Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.
To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
Parents do care about improving learning. I certainly see better outcomes for my kids with book based learning. Mainly because the screen based equivalents have such bad ergonomics at the moment. E-learning "tools" that schools choose seem to be abysmally bad.
For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
What? There's been a bunch of research about how the tactile and 3D experience of touching a book assists in learning and knowledge retention, as does handwriting.
The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.
>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do.
You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. E.g. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.
> can play prediction markets by betting on a swing
The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more like a derivative market than the stock market. You can trade in and out of options. But the value in the system is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum game.
There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers.
The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.
This is one area where the government needs to step in. Video-hosting websites should be made to flag videos as AI-generated. AI companies should be made to watermark generated content in a hard-to-remove way (i.e. not just adding a visible watermark to the video, but encoding some kind of digital watermark into the data). Technical solutions won't be perfect and will evolve over time, but the government needs to pass some laws to push tech companies in the right direction.
The only companies that'd follow the watermark are the good guys though, yeah?
The people you'd want to be wary of would be the ones that'd look legit.
e.g. "yes i guess i will send my son $400,000 in cash tonight because he's been kidnapped, and i know it's real because there's no AI watermark that all the nice US/EU companies use."
Unlike a lot of the posters here, I find Thiel interesting.
I agree with his idea that humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years, and I'm glad we're out of it. I wish we were building more stuff faster (housing, nuclear, renewables, electric cars, etc). I don't consider myself a "transhumanist" but I do think that humanity should orient itself towards overcoming what have been our fundamental limitations (scarcity, death, etc). Ultimately, that could lead to some form of transhumanism albeit in the far, far future.
Thiel's "antichrist" spiel is the idea that fear related to existential risks (climate, nuclear, AI, etc) will make people too timid, and lead to a one-world government that de-prioritizes progress and economic freedom, resulting in longterm stagnation. I'm not especially worried about that, but I do think that excessive timidity is a real problem. I don't mind that Europe increasingly doesn't care about economic growth and has made it harder to invent/build/create, but I don't want the whole world to be like that.
If you disagree with this broad view, think about it more concretely. Take the example of nuclear reactors. If we had been steadily building nuclear reactors for the past 70 years, they would be smaller, safer, more efficient, energy would be more plentiful, and climate change would be less of an issue. Ultimately it was excessive fear that led to the decline of nuclear energy. So, if you find the "antichrist" stuff bizarre and off-putting, at least consider the basic point: excessive fear is a real obstacle towards the goal of fundamentally bettering the human condition.
> humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years
Can you please expand on this claim? The past 20 years have seen hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “progress” here.
Do you think that someone who could spend the average person's entire lifetime income without a second thought might have a blind spot when it comes to obstacles blocking humanity's betterment?
Yeah I reject the point. People aren’t excessively fearful of global warming. Clearly people aren’t scared enough, or they wouldn’t be building 1GW data centers powered by gas turbines
I dunno. You can hear the same spiel on any city bus in the us, but the guy giving it isn’t rich.
How come the whole “world government” thing doesn’t set off tiny alarm bell for you? It’s the politics version of reading a math paper that suddenly starts talking about P=NP; you might be dealing with a crank. Is it not important to you that most other people going on about one world governments eventually turn out to just mean “the Jews”?
And why are we supposed to wade through Thiel’s screeds? To learn that nuclear power is good and that people are scared of things?! Is he the only or the best place to learn that? Is that even all that novel?
Thinking about it more concretely, nuclear shows no credible signs of becoming smaller and cheaper, just a lot of handwaving and hopium about how it might, one day, maybe, perhaps.
Meanwhile we could have gone hard on renewables from the 60s onwards, and the tech actually has a solid objective record of becoming cheaper and more efficient.
One person's timidity is another person's realism.
Tech in itself is never a solution to political problems. And scarcity, etc, are fundamentally political problems.
The problem specifically is creating a political system that keeps narcissists and sociopaths far from power. All of the main isms suffer from this problem, and the consequences of failing to deal with it are consistently, predictably, catastrophically horrific.
Yes. Not a drug in the typical sense. Simply replacing the protein in which the mice are deficient (that was identified by measuring levels in human spinal fluid).
The idea that LLMs don't significantly increase productivity has become ridiculous. You have to start questioning the psychology that's leading people to write stuff like this.
Degrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it.
One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.
The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.
Economic growth just means "providing food, homes, and jobs to people who are alive."
The degrowthers also presume that growth requires some sort of nasty fuel source. Almost some sort of religiosity that believes that anything good must also create some effectively equal amount of bad. Anyone who cares about solar knows that a solar-battery future is effectively 99% recyclable.
Earth is limited. Resources are limited. You can't recycle to infinity. Each time you recycle something, the material recovered is worse than before. Steel is weaker, plastic has impurities and is not clear/transparent, paper isn't white and it contaminates the printers with dust, etc. To keep maintaining quality, fresh material must always be added to the recycled one. Everything we dig out of the Earth is non-renewable. (not in the next million years or so...)
The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources. No more oil, no more uranium, no more iron, no more copper, no more lithium. If we don't degrow voluntarily, then we degrow involuntarily and that's usually sudden and it's called a crash. With no resources, what comes next is dark ages, very dark and loooong dark ages this time. Without steel it we'll go back stone age most probably. I won't live to see it, our children won't live to see it, but unless we all nuke each other over some oil fields or something, someone will live to see it.
Degrowth will extend our present good times. Growth will shorten it.
The lifespan of the earth is not infinite, pretending it is is foolish. We have about 5 billion years on earth before it will be consumed by the sun. Presuming an infinite earth creates a very obvious, simple, and wrong conclusion about something that is actually very difficult problem.
>The logical conclusion is that at some point we run out of resources.
The point of renewable resources -- like solar -- is exactly that they are renewable or effectively infinite.
You’re not really addressing the obvious though: that at the rate that we are consuming and polluting the earth, we could be pushing ourselves into extinction faster than the sun could just naturally swallow up the earth. I don’t think anyone is debating this eventual death of our star, but our astronomers would very much like to live long enough for us to find another home planet and develop the technology to get there.
I mean, I’m advocating for renewable resources… that doesn’t me arbitrarily stopping consumption. It means reorienting consumption to being responsible.
Mechanized farming, for example, prevents famine because it’s wildly more efficient than subsistence farming. Arbitrary “degrowth” does not address the fact that consumption isn’t arbitrary.
Continue your argument. Don't stop at solar. In the next 5 billion years we must leave. How do you propose we do that if we focus on fast fashion and changing cars every 2 years?
I’m skeptical how much those things are contributing to the end of society. My main concern is GHGs, after that, these behaviors are wasteful, yes, but the vast majority of the limited resources can be recaptured.
His commentary is dead-on; Badlands is a movie for children. It has no characters and zero subtlety. The plot is utterly predictable. There's like...one non-CGI character in the whole movie which made it feel like a video game. It's bizarre to me that movies like this are critically acclaimed.
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
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