Seems like most of the books deal with complex real-world issues like sexual identity, racism, school shootings, etc. and are banned due to "sexual" or "violent" content. My guess is these criteria can be selectively interpreted to target books that go against political or cultural beliefs but there is obviously some merit to wanting to protect young kids from certain topics. I wish the article mentioned what ages the books are banned for because that seems like an important piece of data. I'm assuming it includes all K-12 public schools?
That's part of the issue. With Idaho it's black and white. Under 18, these books are banned.
I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.
What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.
I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.
The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.
If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.
I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?
I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.
Because the modern system is that the parenting has been offloaded onto the school. The reason we have sex-ed is because we can't trust parents to do that.
The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.
We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.
I think that's a good system. Simply marking an age range for a book and contacting parents if they stray out seems like a more than acceptable way to handle things.
Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.
The controversy comes from parents disagreeing about which topics and books public schools should protect children from. If some parents want certain books removed and others want them kept, whose preferences should prevail? Should we give a minority a veto over books the majority finds valuable?
For that analogy to really apply to this case, we have to show that keeping books that the minority of parents object to causes irreparable/fatal harm to the minority.
Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't.
Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds.
But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food took it too far. Similarly, most software is net positive, but some apps take it too far.
Perhaps a good indicator of which companies history will view negatively are the ones where there's a high concentration of executives rationalizing their behavior as "it's inevitable."
Obesity rates have never been higher and the top fast food franchises have double digit billions in revenue. I don’t think there is any redemption arc in there for public health since the 90s.
those statistics really gloss over / erase the vast cultural changes that have occurred. america / the west / society's relationship to fast food and obesity is dramatically different than it was thirty years ago.
I'm genuinely curious about the changes you are talking about?
Keep in mind, thirty years ago, I was a kid. I thought that fast food was awesome.
My parents would allow me a fast food meal at best once a month, and my "privileged" friends had a fast food meal a week.
Now, I'd rather starve than eat something coming from a fast food.
But around me, normies at eating at least once a day from a fast food.
We have at least ten big franchises in the country, and at every corner there's a kebab/tacos/weird place selling trash.
So, from my POV, I'd thought that, in general, people are eating much more fast food than thirty years ago.
In the interim America got obsessed with fitness and being out of shape much less obese became dramatically less popular in the middle / upper class.
Like now it's possible to go days in some cities without seeing a single obese person. It's still a big problem. Outside of the cities and in lower class areas, but... I think the changes are trickling down / propagating? That's been my impression at least.
Surprised by your take on fast food, by the way. When I complain about fast food like was ubiquitous in the 90s I think of McDonald's and other highly processed things. The type that are covered in salt and cheap oil and artifical smells and where the meat is like reconstituted garbage, where lunch is 1500 calories, where everyone gets a giant soda, where kids are enticed with cheap plastic crap.
But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all. I feel like most people eating at corner shops for half of their meals is pretty much ideal--if it's affordable to do so then it is a very sensible and economically positive division of labor. On the condition that the food be of decent quality, of course. Which sometimes it is. Perhaps not as much as it should be though, but people do have standards and will pick the better places.
Since you talked about "the west", I applied your comment to my situation also (France).
But it seems that some things were and are still different.
Related to fitness, sure, there's millions of people who "go to the gym" at least one a week and buy food supplements and protein powders...
But they'll happily eat fast foot several times a week.
And if we talk about ultra-processed food, it's even worse.
> But a corner kebab or taco place seems like an unequivocal positive for society, I have no complaints about their existence at all.
That's probably a big difference, because nobody here will dare say that those place serves actual food.
Not because of the cultural aspect, but just because it's the case.
They use the lowest quality in every ingredients, use lots of bad oils to cook, put tons of salt and other additives...
And don't get me started on the hygiene side.
People are perfectly aware of that and they'll even joke about it while eating their 50% fat kebab.
At least McDonald's have the hygiene on their side!
We don't have the same obesity epidemic, partly due to portion sizing and mobility, but almost half the population is overweight and figures are still going up.
The middle and upper class, city people, are just a fraction of the population. If there's been progress, it's not bearing out in the data. Though there appears to be a slight inflection point around the 2010, it seems the trend is still up. Though this data isn't recent enough to include the effects of semaglutide.
Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of water and complaining that the water particles are moving in a direction that the levees pushed them. The levees are actually the bigger problem.
We are the levees in your metaphor and we have agency. The problem is not that one founder does something before another and gains an advantage. The problem is the millions of people who buy or use the harmful thing they create - and that we all have control over. If we continue down this path we'll end up at free will vs determinism and I choose to believe the future is not inevitable.
We aren't the real levees though. The system we live in is. Yes, a few people will push back and try to change the momentum to a different direction but that's painful and we have enough going on each day that most people don't have time for that (let alone agree on the direction). Structural change is the only real way to guide the river.
I get your point. I'm merely pointing out that some things, even though they aren't technically inevitable, are (in practice) essentially inevitable because larger forces are pushing things in that direction.
Through a very complicated, long, and ardous process.
Its mostly by design (at least in my country) so one bad actor (e.g. a failed painter) cant change the whole system instantly
Control is the ability to make decisions. The ability to make decisions depends on knowledge.
Without knowledge, you have no control, only the illusion of it. With fast food, we did not know the harm. With smoking, we did not know the harm. With tiktok... we did not know the harm, and still do not fully grasp it.
Netflix was a great product innovator for a long time but now that they're running out of ideas they're pivoting to acquisitions.
I guess one big difference is that their direct competitors aren't startups - they're Amazon, Apple, etc. - so perhaps this plays out more as a race to acquire studios, IP, and creative talent.
Then if/when they have a monopoly they'll charge $20 a month and still play ads every 5 min and we'll be back to cable.
Man, EA is so close to getting it. They are right that we have a moral obligation to help those in need but they are wrong about how to do it.
Don't outsource your altruism by donating to some GiveWell-recommended nonprofit. Be a human, get to know people, and ask if/how they want help. Start close to home where you can speak the same language and connect with people.
The issues with EA all stem from the fact that the movement centralizes power into the hands of a few people who decide what is and isn't worthy of altruism. Then similar to communism, that power gets corrupted by self-interested people who use it to fund pet projects, launder reputations, etc.
Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
If everyone did that, lots of people would still die of preventable causes in poor countries. I think GiveWell does a good job of identifying areas of greatest need in public health around the world. I would stop trusting them if they turned out to be corrupt or started misdirecting funds to pet projects. I don’t think everyone has to donate this way as it’s very personal decision, nor does it automatically make someone a good person or justify immoral ways of earning money, but I think it’s a good thing to help the less fortunate who are far away and speak a different language.
> Just try to help the people around you a bit more. If everyone did that, we'd be good.
This describes a generally wealthy society with some people doing better than average and others worse. Redistributing wealth/assistance from the first group to the second will work quite well for this society.
It does nothing to address the needs of a society in which almost everyone is poor compared to some other potential aid-giving society.
Supporting your friends and neighbors is wonderful. It does not, in general, address the most pressing needs in human populations worldwide.
There might be a bit of a language barrier, so you’ll need a translator. Also a place to stay, people to cook for you, and transportation. The tourist infrastructure isn’t all that developed in the poorest areas.
Tourism does redistribute money, but a lot of resources go to taking care of the tourists.
That's the thing though, if EA had said: find 10 people in your life and help them directly, it wouldn't have appealed to the well-off white collar workers that want to spend money, but not actually do anything. The movement became popular because it didn't require one to do anything other than spend money in order to be lauded.
Better, it’s a small step to “being a small part of something that’s doing a little evil to a shitload of people (say, working on Google ~scams targeting the vulnerable and spying on everybody~ Ads) is not just OK, but good, as long as I spend a few grand a year buying mosquito nets to prevent malaria, saving a bunch of lives!”
Why hasn't a social media platform with mandatory verification to prove users are unique humans taken off yet? Still too hard to break the existing network effects?
That's Facebook. Just because it's mandatory doesn't mean people aren't going to cheat it. And cheating is the problem. Verifying that it's an actual human sitting at the keyboard is basically an exam proctoring level problem. Otherwise people will just produce vast farms of accounts.
AI of course makes it easier to fake whatever kind of evidence the verifier is asking for: there will be an arms race between fake AI and verification AI.
(the nearest to verified membership I've actually seen in practice was, oddly, Debian developers - you had to get a key signed in person to be in the club)
Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.
Who cares about planetary scale? Back when your networking reach was largely limited by the size of your area code, local BBSes had user verification and were incredibly popular.
Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
Anonymity is more important, and verification systems can always be gamed. To add, given what you see well known people post under their real name, including Trump posting a video of himself shitting all over Americans, I don't understand what benefit you're expecting to get.
Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
I stopped reading all news except for a daily non partisan newsletter and it has made me much happier. One criticism I often get is that I’m not fulfilling my duty of being an informed citizen - but people forget that the benefit of being informed is to improve your or someone else’s life. If the news is wasting your time and draining your energy more than it’s giving you actionable insights you can do something tangible about, it’s not worth reading. Of course, maybe you just enjoy the news, but then it’s entertainment (and not a civic duty). I think this idea of being an informed citizen is carried over from prior eras when news was scarce, sort of like how my grandma used to get mad at me if I didn’t finish my McNuggets in the 90’s, not realizing “chicken” could be unhealthy since meat had always been such a scarce luxury in her life.
If you read Thiel’s internal emails with Mark Zuckerberg, it’s clear he thinks a lot about public perception and how to frame tech to the masses.
The antichrist stuff strikes me as a debate tactic. Public sentiment has been trending toward, “maybe tech is kinda bad” so to shift the frame, Thiel says something extreme he knows will get headlines like, “if you regulate tech you might be the antichrist.” He also sprinkles in “or maybe there’s a 1% chance tech kills everyone” to deflate tech criticism from the other angle.
My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction (Thiel apparently limits his kid to one hour of screen time per week) and that because social media’s downsides caught nearly everyone by surprise we’re overcorrecting with AI safety stuff.
> My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction
That's a huge part of it but not only. Tech is being used to remove humans from the loop of interactions, people feel disdain to have to answer a robot when trying to call somewhere to get support (banks, telcos, etc.), they also disdain being surveilled all the time, online or offline, it's enabled by "tech"; there's disdain for applications to jobs, grants (scientific or cultural) being triaged by robots, one just feel swallowed by a system they have no power to appeal, the robots decided and there's no one to talk to about it.
There's a lot of tech that is useful, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think the disdain comes only from social media/phone addiction, those are just the more visible, talked about parts of it. In my immediate circle of the non-tech people they just constantly feel the encroaching of tech mediating real humans, we're being herded by a multitude of systems working on their own programming, and people just defer to those systems.
A prime example of such systems going haywire was the British Horizon Post Office scandal, a system to automate detection of fraud was trusted more than any human, causing untold suffering to postmasters flagged as criminals, pushing some to the point of suicide.
The trend for now is for this to only increase, more automated systems taking over decision-making roles, people who would be making decisions just blindly deferring to the system, with no recourse or way out for anyone affected.
It's bleak, it's understandable that people don't like this. I've been working in the tech industry for 20+ years and I don't like what it is now.
Just be careful, there was an Austrian painter in the past who also had very unique takes and even wrote a book, but it didn't end well for him or for anyone who started thinking that way.
I am not the OG commentator, but it’s not a mental illness to believe something that has been presented from authority to you for all your life. That’s a pretty normal human response.
I’d bet money that everyone on this site believes deeply in something that others would fine unusual, mainly because it’s been culturally or religiously significant to them.
While it's impossible to completely avoid beliefs that are effectively from authority, we do have systems such as science (scientific peer review), capitalism (economic freedom) that give credibility to certain ideas or patterns. Not moral credibility, but effective consensus that is relatively stable. Sure there are disruptions -- scientific revolutions, economic creative destruction -- but those are typically viewed as having been good things after the fact.
Moral authority (elders, traditions, cultural norms) can be helpful in some ways, but they are much more crude and error prone. Respected elders can prey on children, long-held traditions can be oppressive and even harmful (genital mutilation, circumcision). Cultural norms can create significant social costs (women keeping house rather than starting companies or curing diseases, men spending weekends bored out of the social pressure to pretend to like various sports, ec.)
When the average person flips on a light switch they believe they know why the light turned on -- electricity! wire! -- but few could explain it much more specifically than that and could not ELI5 it. So in a sense they are expressing a faith-based belief. But most people can tell you who does understand it and know how to find more detailed explanations if they care to learn. This is quite unlike religious faith/tradition which demands that people profess beliefs that are impossible. When you think about it, the word faith means nearly the same thing as the word doubt only with a different connotation.
I am trying to understand your comment in context with the thread. Are you saying that if people continue to hold cultural or religious beliefs via faith in this day and age that they are mentally ill? You don’t outright say this, but in context that’s the message I took from it.
Perhaps you just used it as a springboard to point out contradiction of certain beliefs with modern knowledge or perhaps it’s a bias against religion that you hold. If so, noted.
Not at all. I respect that people accept religious authority, the authority of trusted elders., etc., as part of their decision making function. But in my view it should be considered largely an aesthetic preference, much like a favorite color or favorite rock and roll band or preferred pizza toppings.
Such authority has an important societal role, and traditions are important for a lot of people.
Thiel is smart. He is not from the US, so you can be sure he is not really religious. This is a ruse to prevent him and his ilk being regulated and his power being diminished.
Anybody who threatens regulation or upsetting the current order is, by his definition, the anti-christ. He doesn't need everybody to believe him. Just enough useful idiots.
