What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Maybe Gen Z has the answer.
I'm for legalizing all drugs, regulating the sale, ensuring quality and purity, and educating the public. Cognitive liberty is sacred - but the dip in drinking has a whole lot of causes.
A healthier society would be more social and get out and drink more, I think.
Oh, and weed being increasingly legal to consume.
Also seems like the science on whether science communication actual changes behavior doesn't point towards it being much of a cause here.
As long as there are people who don’t acknowledge or care about the health effects it will exist. If that’s a plurality of your population then you have a fundamental population problem IF you are in the group who thinks it’s bad.
Aka every minority-majority split on every issue ever.
So the answer is: live in a society governed by science. Unfortunately none exist
And PM's earnings are mostly from developing countries at this point. In the US alone, the adult smoking rate has fallen nearly 73% from 1965 to now, so clearly the regulations are working.
We need to do the same for social media. People didn't quit smoking because they suddenly got more disciplined. We just made it inconvenient. The biggest start would be get rid of algorithmic feeds and "recommendations" keep it purely chronological, only from people you explicitly follow.
We need to culturally consider Social Media use to be disgusting or at least something to be ashamed of.
Everyone knows what the dangers of alcohol are now. We need to get reliable data one can base policy on and then let the public health system do their thing. Maybe not every health authority but enough of them to protect the species at large. Then we'll get social media out of schools, away from young people, vulnerable folks, etc.
Science is a lagging indicator of reality. It is by definition conservative (in that it requires rigorous, repeatable data before it can label something as true). Because of that, there's usually a pretty substantial gap between human discovery and scientific consensus.
Mindfulness was discovered, as an example, to be beneficial as far back as 500 BCE. It wasn't "proven" with science until 1979.
Sometimes we just need to rely on lived experience to make important decisions, especially regulation. We can't always wait for science.
The latter category know who you are. You downvoted this comment.
It turns out that if you present as an honest, non-interested party, people will call you and ask you for your advice. I do admit that the ease of this is going to be a function of the people you are up against and the subject being regulated. My point of this comment is: default to action. “You can just do things.”
Laws are very much fashionable, but only for us. “Rules for thee but not for me” is what's in season right now.
nothing. if it isn't illegal, it isn't illegal.
previous generations of neurotics objected to many current (at the time) things we don't bat an eye about. when was the last time you saw anyone campaign against satanic music, violent video games, or hardcore pornography?
Many things were not illegal before they became illegal.
> nothing. if it isn't illegal, it isn't illegal.
Are you suggesting that because something isn't illegal, it shouldn't be illegal?
Are you perhaps a representative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?
How about coming up with an actual defense of social media rather than an ad hominem about "neurotics"?
people who raised alarm about such things could easily be branded as conspiracy theorists. even now, at this very website, so full of well-educated folx, people who speak out against xenoestrogens, for example, are being downvoted to hell.
Shut down the behavior with regulations or shut down the companies. Meta and TikTok have no natural right to exist if they are a net negative to society.
For example, some teen got radicalized with racist and sexist content. That's bad in my opinion, as I'm not a racist or a sexist. But should racist or sexist speech be censored or regulated? On what grounds? How do we know other unpopular (now or in the future) speech won't be censored or regulated in the future? Again, as much as I'm not a racist or sexist, I don't think the government should have a say in whether a company should be able to promote speech like "whites/blacks are X" or "men/women are Y". What's next? Should we regulate speech about religion (Christians/Muslims/atheists are Z) or ethics (anti-war people or vegans are Q) or politics or drugs or sex?
The current situation is shitty, but giving too much power to regulators will likely make it way shittier. If not now, in the future, since passed regulations are rarely removed.
Why? User engagement isn't the same thing as market share.
If McDonald's trained its cashiers to insult you while taking your order, engagement would go up, and market share would go down.
* "eat tide pods" * "stick a fork in electrical sockets in your school" * "destroy your school's shit" aka "Devious Licks" - bathrooms, chromebooks (jamming stuff into the charging ports to start fires...) * "drink a shitload of Benadryl to see what happens" * "steal a kia/hyundai and drive 80mph, run from the cops, etc"
...convince me that this is not a purposeful attack on US society by the CCP?
Forgeties79•1h ago
Not saying “well duh” I just think at this point I have to ask “are we going to do anything about it?”
We’ve known about the financial incentives to promote anger and outrage online for at least a decade now. So what are we going to do about it?