[colechristensen]

This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

[cycomanic]

> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.

The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).

> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

[liamdgray]

Some students even wish for a ban to reduce the pressure to keep up with social media.

That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.

[throwaway-blaze]

By "his kind" you mean human beings?

[phatfish]

Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".

[ghostpepper]

> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?

[colechristensen]

"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument

>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.

Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...

Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.

Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)

[phatfish]

But all the middle aged people are wasting their lives on the junk information addiction train as well. It's not some generational divide.

It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.

[edmundsauto]

Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.

[pembrook]

Lots of bending over backwards and appeals to authority to rationalize an emotional feeling of "This time is different."

Again, every generation thinks that.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

[placatedmayhem]

> Again, every generation thinks that.

> This time might be different. But it's probably not.

And this is an appeal to tradition.

This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739

[pembrook]

When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

[rablackburn]

That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.

[AppleBananaPie]

Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?

We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

[card_zero]

Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.

[Loughla]

What is your point? I'm afraid I missed the point of your statement.

[DocTomoe]

There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.

Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.

What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..

[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/medias-first-moral-pani...

[burnished]

Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.

[logifail]

> prohibition breeds desire

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

[wizzwizz4]

It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.

[colechristensen]

>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

[logifail]

> I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard [..]

I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!)

> Don't set your kid up for failure

I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)

[colechristensen]

Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.

it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell

[eastbound]

Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.

[pempem]

Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.

[tintor]

It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist.

You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s