Morality being absolute means just that you subjectively consider some moral rules absolute. Doesn't make them so, the way the law of gravity is absolute.
And it doesn't mean that every human society agrees to what you consider "absolute".
All things you consider "absolute", there are whole societies which found them to be just fine, and you'd do too if you were raised in them, including incest, murder of innocents, slavery, torture...
Many things are naturally repulsive, but are indulged out of necessity or gain. For instance Aristotle wasn't opposed to slavery, yet nonetheless in his writings, now some 2400+ years ago, he found himself obligated to lay out an extensive and lengthy defense and rationalization of such, and he even predicted what would eventually end it:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
There were millennia of efforts to end slavery, but it's only the technological and industrial revolution that finally succeeded in doing so. But the point is that even though Aristotle was ostensibly not opposed to slavery, he nonetheless knew it was a decision that needed justification because it was fundamentally repulsive, even in a society where it was ubiquitous and relatively non-controversial, thousands of years ago.
This 'natural repulsion' is, I think, some degree of evidence for persistent, if not absolute, morality throughout at least thousands of years of humanity's existence, and I see no reason to assume it would not trend back long further than that.
>Many things are naturally repulsive, but are indulged out of necessity or gain
Most "naturally repulsive" things were accepted just fine in one society or another.
Aristole spent time to defend and rationalize slavery because that was just job, to spend time rationalizing things. Other societies practiced it with no such worries, and found it perfectly natural.
But even if we grant you your "naturally repulsive" actions existing, it doesn't mean they are objectively morally wrong. Just that their moral judgement is not just based on culture and historical period, but also on evolutionary adaptations. These could very well be considered fine in an earlier/later evolutionary stage (in an earlier one, for sure: animals don't have such qualms).
His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts. And indeed his arguments for slavery were some of his weakest precisely because they were uncharacteristic rationalizations.
I completely agree that if you go back far enough in the evolutionary pipeline then my claim becomes invalid. I also think it would not apply to people of a sufficiently reduced IQ. You need to have a minimum of intelligence to understand what you're doing, alternatives, and its consequences on others. But once you have that baseline of IQ then I think morality, and a natural repulsion to certain behaviors, comes as naturally as communication.
>His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts.
I think that's an after-the-fact assessment of what his treatment of the subject was, which we arrive at because of our modern morals.
In his time he, and his audience, didn't think of it as rationalization, but as legitimate use of logic and reason, just like his treatment of other topics.
>But once you have that baseline of IQ then I think morality, and a natural repulsion to certain behaviors, comes as naturally as communication.
Might go the over way around too though: once you go above a certain IQ, it might be easier to treat morality as a fiction naked apes developed, as opposed to something objective, and even discard it entirely.
No, his arguments were materially different in this case. Most of his arguments came from first principles and worked outwards from some baseline; in particular - what is virtue and how virtue, itself, leads to satisfaction in life, and onward to how this can apply to systems and politics in general. But slavery he treated in an entirely different, practically ad hoc, fashion starting from slavery and then trying to shoe-horn in a justification along the lines of what you alluded to already with e.g. natural order and it being an inescapable inevitability.
It was a complete, and poor, rationalization. He even added, almost as a disclaimer, that there was not a complete overlap between 'natural' slaves and legal slaves, giving himself a plausible out to explain the endless examples of the repulsiveness of the institution by applying a no true scotmans fallacy, 'Ahh yes, I would agree with you there. But that is because that is not a natural slave, but merely a legal one.' And this is not my opinion alone. It has long been considered notably weak, especially from an otherwise brilliant man.
And I think that leads into your next issue. I don't think higher intelligence makes it easier to treat morality as a fiction, but rather even average intelligence, without discipline and virtue, makes it very easy to engage in self delusion and cognitive dissonance. Even those conditions are hardly a guarantee - Aristotle certainly had and strived for both discipline and virtue, yet the desire to rationalize what we want to be true, even if we know it is not, is a never-ending struggle that's easy to fail.
Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.
Facebook then wasn't what facebook is today. The social media of the early internet was largely a digital expansion of otherwise healthy social norms. Then the internet blew up. Now it's more akin to the drug dealers DARE warned us about. Still waiting on _those_ free drugs, tbh.
Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.
If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.
It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.
What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons. However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic modern feed garbage content in general.
I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.
The only data point I referred to is the dramatic rise starting in 2015, and the divergence by gender. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that, just the presumed usage patterns he thinks go along with those. The criticisms of him are basically orthogonal to the point I’m making.
I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and scale.
Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.
Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.
And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.
> we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted
That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.
Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
The previous static ads of the past are completely different beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven design(leading to doomscrolling etc).
My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so of course they're more anxious/depressed.
The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
You might not have opened any social media app lately. You need 10 seconds before you're sucked into the feed. Likes are a thing of the past, they just gather your interests by your reaction time on any content they show you.
Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?
I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.
I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.
>How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.
It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).
Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.
It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.
Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally... you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there are some guardrails). Social media can with much less restriction.
I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.
Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
I do agree that banning advertising would be good (though not the only problem). However, you don't need social media to socialize online (text messaging, messaging groups, etc. all still exist).
I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
Exactly. All my glassware are Duralex including coffe cups, and I haven't broken a single glass in 25+ years. Yet, they regularly fall on the ceramic kitchen floor from a hip level.
Of course, only because Apple and Google did everything in their power to prevent people sending files directly between devices. When you have a duopoly that splits the population in two parts and they can't send files between them, of course users will rely on messaging apps to share stuff.
Short story: I did a long trip across two continent with my wife. Me with an Android devices, her on iOS. We did backup our photos in our own private cloud but guess how we had to quick exchange photos while in the wild (no wifi and sometimes no network)? We couldn't. Because Google and Apple did everything so we couldn't.
Google wants to your data and fought for the cloud. Apple don't want Android users to easily partake in some data exchange with iOS users (you gotta buy your ticket to their jail). So sad you don't realize how backward that is.
I don't think that is the reason. I think people tend to choose by default the same app they are communicating on. It just feels more natural and straightforward.
The same thing used to happen (and still continues) with emails. Even with shared cloud drives synchronized to their computers an awful lot of people are still sending files by email/teams/ticketing systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mole:_Undercover_in_North_...
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