Gaashk
5d ago
Yes, I have a lot more sympathy for trying to get parents to not let their kids have smart phones, in comparison with not letting them have computers more generally. I don't want my kids to have smart phones until they're old enough to drive, but we'll see if that ends up working out or not.
Gaashk
5d ago
I've seen that on Youtube, but not Netflix or PBS kids, which is what I'm most familiar with. I've seen a lot of Gabby's Dollhouse lately, which isn't fantastic, but seems reasonably innocuous. Youtube Kids especially seems to be absolute garbage. Octonauts looked fine. I watched a lot of hours of my brother playing Mega Man and Super Mario Brothers as a kid, which was not very productive for sure.
Gaashk
5d ago
My father reports being an introverted child in the 50s and 60s, and spending a fair amount of time literally staring at a wall. Sometimes playing wall ball with himself. My mother had a swimming pool, so was better off. My impression from Southern American writing is that people spent a lot of time squatting beside roads and getting into fights. I suppose it's fair to ask, when doing things through a screen "what's the alternative at this moment?" If the alternative is "get more sleep" or "spend time in the garden," then, certainly, one should go do that.
Gaashk
5d ago
Yes, this is what bothers me.
If I watch shows, do taxes, make arrangements to meet up with friends, learn a craft skill, write an essay, facilitate a video call between my mom and her grandchildren, and troll my outgoup, all on screens, then I should probably also go touch grass or something, but some of those are way more subject to overuse than others.
The algorithm discourse bothers me less, I am more concerned about my children seeing wildly different content than me on the same platform.
Gaashk
6d ago
Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement policies from the company side. Davidson said that he thought it was utterly insane that families in the 90s bought computers and connected them to the internet at all, but as I say, he was on a podcast and published a book, so how extreme could he really be in that respect?
Instagram is interesting, because it shows different faces to different people. Also on Maiden Mother Matriarch, Jean Twenge was talking about how it conforms to the insecurities of girls, especially, but an adult might get a totally acceptable Instagram feed. My feed is a couple of IRL friends, a bunch of totally normal art, and some costumes, but I didn't have an account until I was almost 30. AI also sees extremely sensitive to phrasing, so if you write to it as an adult who's trying to get something done, it will be your colleague, but it's hard to pretend to be someone else effectively enough to guess how it will respond to them.
Gaashk
6d ago
But it is NOT possible to have an internet-enabled device that lacks a slippery slope from “You are watching an educational Youtube video” to “You are now addicted to dopaminagenic slop”.
What does that mean? I'm pretty picky, and often do look at Youtube or Instagram, see that there's nothing interesting there, and then close the tabs and go to bed or sit under a tree with a physical book. Maybe I'm a bit odd. If I'm feeling... stressed? I'm not sure what the state is... I'll refresh The Motte or something over and over for a while, and yeah that's dumb, I shouldn't do that. I should probably take a nap at that point.
I was listening to my daughter play Hytale, and she was narrating some story about a dragon, and she was going to send it food so it wouldn't eat the villagers, and then she was making them a protector, and then it was raining pigs, and there was a zoo, and it sounded very similar to when she's drawing and narrating stories about how her doll is putting on a party, and these are invitations, here have an invitation, and now they need to reverse for their performance, and so on and so forth.
Gaashk
6d ago
Today I was listening to a Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast (paywalled on Substack, but available with ads on Apple Podcast), with Louise Perry interviewing John Daniel Davidson, and there were a lot of both dubious and interesting things there, but the one that caused an emotional reaction for me was the discussion of "screens," which I've been having with some in person friends, and seeing around Substack lately as well. I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why. Especially when Davidson kept repeating "it rewires their brains" over and over again. My pop neuroscience model is built on a few fluffy books about neuroplasticity from a decade ago, but I thought basically everything required our brains?
There are indeed a lot of things on the internet, and especially social media, that are bad in the way casinos are bad, but calling this "screens" feels like calling slot machines "levers" or something. It's not like I could have accessed the podcast, other than by learning about it online, anyway. Was it more virtuous to listen to Davidson talk than to read him on Substack? Maybe! I was doing work with my hands while I listened.
Jonathan Haidt thinks that children shouldn't be able to post on social media or have smart phones (or internet enabled private devices more generally), and I think that may be reasonable, especially in regards to people posting photos of themselves, sure, everyone should think long and hard about doing that, and usually shouldn't. But at the same time, I don't really trust the enforcers, and do think that the rules wouldn't fall where I would hope.
Louise Perry didn't push back as much as I would have liked against the "demonic, insane, evil" rhetoric in regards to "screens" (by which I think Davidson meant something more like "the unfiltered internet"), but did mention something like that she thinks it's probably alright for her children to watch fairy tales sometimes, but that it's weird and a bit disturbing if they're watching another kid play on Youtube. And I agree that, yes, that's kind of weird, I wouldn't let my children watch that. I didn't let my child watch more than one episode of "Is it Cake," either, because that also seemed a bit weird.
Anyway, is there anyone out there who has an actually useful way of discussing "screens," especially in respect to children, but also in general? If I had more attention to devote to the topic, maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulcrum and Simulation, since at least the title seems like it's heading in an interesting direction.
Gaashk
7d ago
I tried looking up the protest leader mentioned in the article, Jake Lang, to see what he had to say about things, and couldn't find anything other than slurs against him, so it's hard to say. I could have tried harder, but I felt like the Google search engine was doing it on purpose, and I didn't really want to log out of accounts to probe further.
Gaashk
8d ago
I'm rooting for 3-D printed houses to take off more, I like the aesthetics of how they can have curves more easily, and kind of like the extruded concrete look. I suppose roofing is still an impediment; the ones that stack up to a skylight on top are kind of weird and not versatile for multiple rooms.
Gaashk
8d ago
Sure. I just agree the WASP lite take is directionally correct. My mom homeschooled my brother and I, then worked as a public school teacher when I was old enough to leave the house and go to college. It would have been a bit better if she'd gotten a job when I was a teen, but it wasn't disastrous. But, also, she's smart and conscientious. My father is reasonably smart, not as conscientious, but perfectly willing to read books and go to church book club for entertainment instead of more expensive activities. People who are smart, conscientious, not given to envy, and generally somewhat virtuous are still living that lifestyle today. My family is to some extent, but it's not great, we need to get out of it sooner rather than later.
Gaashk
9d ago
for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
This is a choice everyone's making, yes. Because we value qualifications more than we value children. As far as the things that humans need other humans to do, many, perhaps most, don't really need college. I like college, I enjoyed going, and am the sort of person who might have just kept going forever if I could have, but it's not actually the case that the only jobs that need to get done are chopping onions 10 hrs a day, or academic tasks. And AI is set to gut the college level tasks before the manual ones anyway. If our civilization is wealthy enough to provide it, I'm basically still fine with every young adult getting to go make friends and read books for several years, it's lovely, but it's not inevitable.
I agree with other commenters that both parents working outside the home is also, to a large extent, a choice most people are making, because otherwise we'd have to make a lot of sacrifices for unclear benefits. Being a stay at home parent of young children is exhausting and frustrating. Being a stay at home wife without children, or with older children, is not respectable. I know people who are homeschooling their children while their husbands work perfectly ordinary lower middle class jobs, it's possible for people who really want to do it. It's just kind of frustrating, lonely, and tedious for those who aren't naturally inclined that way (which seems to be most people).
Gaashk
9d ago
We only wash/clean once a week, but we don't invite people over without advanced planning. There was a time when I had a baby in a 500 sq ft apartment, and would only go to the laundromat once a month (and I don't have a huge amount of clothes), but I suppose I was to some degree slumming it at the time.
Gaashk
9d ago
If you've saved up ahead of time, or don't mind living in a bad part of town with a bad school.
Gaashk
9d ago
It wasn't. Watching someone pace around, silently fuming about someone else, or loudly fuming about someone else, is an example of my day getting worse, but not an example of domestic abuse. You don't want to give specific examples, but it's a scenario where specifics and iterated patterns matter.
If this were an in person conversation, I would somehow end up trying to defend women I don't know nor know anything about, just because the "all women" claim is so unlikely, then feeling irritated about it afterwards, because it's not like I want to defend your sucky girlfriend that I don't even know, maybe she really is a terrible person who asks "how was your day?" in a hostile way.
Gaashk
9d ago
Inb4 a chorus of armchair psychoanalysts piping up how this explains everything, Freud this, social script that, no, fuck it, I haven't observed anyone female behaving differently even at a distance ever.
That actually supports the psychoanalytic interpretation over the "maybe all the women in your life are just sucky" one, though. There certainly are terrible women, but the ending suggests that isn't primarily what you're describing. If I were in your physical space right now, my day might just be about to get a lot worse.
Gaashk
9d ago
It's not just effectively prohibited, it's actually prohibited, even for child care workers. The children cannot be with their parents, they must be enrolled, taxed, and watched by someone else.
Gaashk
9d ago
I appreciate this. I was feeling a bit bent out of shape about the "sweet and stress-free woman who made delicious food with cheap healthy ingredients and beautified the whole house and wants to listen to how their day went," but not sure what to say about it. Sure. We all want to be surrounded by virtuous people intent on serving us.
Gaashk
9d ago
It's the sort of thing where she starts asking how your day was as a proxy for wondering if you're about to make her day bad as well, if you coming home tends to make her day worse. If you manage to express that your day was up to this point bad, but that it's better now that you're home, and you're not planning to make her day significantly worse by exuding fury for the next hour, then it's fine.
Gaashk
12d ago
There are all sorts of social coordination problems that religious gatherings solve. Volunteer organizations too, but they tend to be a bit more sex segregated. I've never heard of anyone IRL meeting anyone (friend, romantic, other) at a bar (I'm an older millennial). A bar is where you go with someone who has already agreed to a date. Most people I know met people at college, a club, or church, then at some point invited them to a bar. Which makes a lot more sense, it's risky to go out with someone who doesn't have any mutual friends, and is unknown in one's social circle.
Gaashk
20d ago
There are a decent number of muslims and extremely conservative Christians in America.
Do secular Americans care about an age gap unless it's someone literally in their family? If it's within their family, they would have a lot more to go off of than just that, so their opinions would probably be specific to the people involved.
Gaashk
20d ago
Yes, my main experience with age gaps is in Islamic villages. It's so uncommon in my home culture as to not have an opinion other than "huh, guess you have unusual tastes," without that much more thought put into it.
Gaashk
20d ago
Large age differentials are so uncommon in my social sphere, that my actual encounter is from time spent in rural Muslim Albanian villages. I don't think I've met a mainstream American woman who was sexually attracted to a settled boomer man, so it's not really a point of concern. I suppose if it happened, I might think something like "huh, that was unexpected," and not much else.
I doubt your description of grief was accurate for most people at any point in history, including now. I know women who were widowed with young children, and in general they don't entirely break down. It's super sucky, yeah. But they work and care for the babies and sometimes move houses and all sorts of functional adult things. This is not on account of not loving their husband! People do all sorts of difficult things, they work in the bottom of mines until they die, too, and fight in the trenches.
In the same societies with high infant mortality, mothers had to nurse their babies basically full time, and also carry them everywhere they went. Helping with the reaping? Carry the baby. Going to bed? With the baby. People talk about babies not having an idea of themselves as separate from their mothers for some time, and the "fourth trimester." Losing an infant would be like a super sucky miscarriage or stillbirth, something modern women do still experience. I know someone who lost her baby at a couple of months old, and she's really upset about it, for sure. She talks about it and posts memorials and raises money for causes that are trying to help babies with similar problems. But, yeah, she did still have to care for her other children and go back to work in a reasonable amount of time.
One thing I think might be more important is that women bearing and losing multiple children is more symmetrical with men fighting in wars (and losing friends, it's not like soldiers at war have a reputation for unusually cold friendships) than with men working jobs, especially office jobs. A society where men fight and possibly die, and women bear and raise children, and possibly die, is tenable. One where men work office jobs and women also work office jobs, but can bear children if they choose, as their hobby, is not tenable at scale (gestures to modern world).
(But all people in previous societies were religious to some extent, which does probably improve purpose and resilience. The woman who lost her baby also talks about wanting to see her baby again in Heaven, which was a big concern, and why Catholics have infant baptism)
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