| > but I have to wonder if, at certain frequencies, normal emotions become harmful I think if I had one criticism of social media it wouldn't be that it emotionally harms people, but that it intellectually harms them by distorting how common or representative certain things are. I've spent about 20 years of my life in debate communities online, and by far the way I'm most likely to be wrong about something is by not realising I have a biased perspective. Social media is absolutely awful for this. I've seen myself and most people I know go down some rabbit hole online where they start to subconsciously believe something is far more of a problem than it actually is because they're following and interacting with other people who share that bias. So on HN you might expect that people's thoughts on technology to not be representative of society in general, but would you expect the articles shared here about economics to be unrepresentative and biased? It's these highly correlated, yet much less obvious biases that people seem to unconsciously absorb. I think the only thing I disagree about what you're saying is that exposure to stuff like warfare and genocide is harmful. The world is a pretty brutal place if you venture out of North America or Western Europe. For example, about a month ago my girlfriend went to Egypt with some female friends. Prior to her leaving I spent several weeks warning her that as a young blonde English women that she was going to be harassed and that she needed to be careful because Egypt is a dangerous place for women – especially people as naive to the world as her. But she didn't understand and thought I was just being racist and exaggerating what men were like there. But to be fair to her, why would she understand? Every muslim and every person from the Middle-East she's ever interacted with in the UK has been fine. And the travel videos she watched all painted a rosey picture biased by various factors. Anyway, I won't go into details, but she returned from that holiday terrified and has now said she won't go to any muslim majority country again after getting into multiple dangerous situations with men. I actually think she is now over reacting, but this highlights the problem of having unrepresentative experiences. I see this bias constantly from people in the West because we live in unusually safe conditions and promote the most unrepresentative examples of people from different cultures in our media. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I think most people probably would benefit from seeing how unsafe and horrid the world is, but social media doesn't do that unless you explicitly seek it. It focuses far more on things like police shootings and serial killers which are statistically extremely unlikely events and unrepresentative events. |