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I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
I think there are some confusing claims being made here.
How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.
Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!
This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.
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Do you think the modal teen fits that description?
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.
If one values the experiences of the most talented and capable at the same order of magnitude as the least, it's probably not a good policy, sure.
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Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)
I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).
At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.
I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.
I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.
The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.
Oi, where's your freedom license?I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).
This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.
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They're trying to legislate this in Australia right now.
Does everyone need to show their ID to get a social media account up? Do I need to show ID for this website? Who is storing my information and where is it going? What about VPNs (every second youtuber is shilling them, kids could easily set one up) to bypass the ban and log in from a more permissive jurisdiction - ban them? What about 4chan or its derivatives - they can't be bothered to do age-verification (and don't have the resources) - ban them? Xbox and Playstation have online chat, thousands and thousands of games have online chat. Are they all social media? In a stroke online privacy is greatly diminished, along with all small web forums.
At least in crypto you have marginally higher chances of making money and it's not inherently rigged against you. Down with sports betting, up with Shiba and Doge.
Societies' restrictive energies should remain focused on drugs, they cause much more harm than gambling does.
Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.
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I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:
I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.
Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.
For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.
But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.
Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.
Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.
On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.
But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.
'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.
On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.
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I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.
Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.
To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.
There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.
And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.
Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.
Is this kind of meddling permissible?
Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.
Is this kind of meddling permissible?
Finally, if a customer tries to transfer more than X to online gambling companies this month, the system pauses the transaction and suggests the customer sets up a monthly gambling limit.
I don't think this kind of meddling is more bothersome than the previous ones.
I personally would like to get rid of the two examples you mentioned as well. The kind of big brother monitoring banks do is obnoxious as hell and I'm not convinced it is an overall value-add for society.
That's because your parents haven't yet deposited their life savings into a "secure account" because a helpful "FBI agent" told them to.
It turns out that I do not hold opinions on policy based on whether or not the negative consequences of said policies personally impact me or those I love.
But why?
Because I'm not a hypocrite? I don't really think it needs a justification to be willing to apply rules consistently, or to be willing to suffer the negative consequences of a rule because you believe it's a good rule overall.
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No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.
Depends on what you mean. Such transfers may be interrupted by fraud detection and the customer might have to prove his bona fides (which is annoying enough) but having to write an essay explaining to one's bank why you're spending your own money isn't really acceptable.
It’s pretty common and most people don’t keep Benjamins under their mattress.
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It's standard procedure in Europe. It actually saved me money when someone managed to clone my wife's card.
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