Facebook is a pox on civilization, so one possibility is just firing it into the sun.

Pretty sure this isn't what they are teaching at the best business schools.

I think the main difference is that radium was new and people have been using psychedelics forever.

Yeah exactly, such "comparison is my passion" vibes from parent comment given radium was not used for ritualistic practices for thousands of years before Radium was even discovered

> just living in some rural area with limited participation in real life

They might say the same thing about your lifestyle. The "reward structure of society" is highly abstract these days, arguably disconnected from "real life". You could say monks are disconnected from "real life."

This is a weird take, I think.

I think this is more of an example of what arguments you are exposed to. We typically only see the most superficial version of our opponents arguments and we see complex versions of our own. Its one of the simplest kinds of propaganda.

"Capital" is a big honking book. It has substantially more to it than "take their money and give it to us," and contemporary leftist thought has a huge number of different intellectual takes on how to right the world, from syndicalism to libertarian socialism, and the debates are vigorous (sometimes too vigorous, if you ask me).

I could just as easily characterize (eg) the Christian right as fundamentally only making one argument: "God wants it to be this way." That would be dumb. I've read CS Lewis and Chesterton, Ivan Illich. I happen to think that, fundamentally, there isn't anything like the Christian god out there, but I can see that its not just as simple as the cartoon I sketched above.

I sympathetic to this perspective, as a parent, but also, there are just a lot of kids out there with bad parents.

My personal philosophy is that parents have a duty to raise their children but that duty is on behalf of the society into which the children will eventually enter. Consequently, a just society may sometimes impose itself on parental freedoms (in the case of neglect, for example) because, in the end, the child's ultimate guardian and responsibility is the society itself, not the parents. The internet is full of material exposure to which, for children, could reasonably be construed as neglect or abuse, and it is insufficient to leave the entirety of the responsibility to the parents, in that case.

I don't know why Americans are so obsessed with freedom as if were the only social good that a society can pursue. There are many things which make life worth living, that contribute to flourishing, and freedom is high on that list, but its not the only thing.

All that said, I don't approve of age checks of the sort being proposed everywhere now. We can do a lot better at mitigating these problems without damaging privacy so much.

I think that the individual does not raise children on behalf of society, I think that society raises children on behalf of the individual. I also think that when society fails to keep up it's end of the deal, the individual should have the right to walk away from it.

Your stance is also reasonable, and I understand it. I just happen to disagree with it at a pretty fundamental level.

> I don't know why Americans are so obsessed with freedom as if were the only social good that a society can pursue.

It's an interesting question isn't it? The balance between what is best for the individual, and what is best for society and who gets to decide exactly where the balance should be is probably one of the most fundamental problems that face humans.

Personally, I'm so far left that I've almost gone right. I think that others should be able to raise their children however they'd like unless it rises to the level of genuine violent abuse. Just making different moral, political, or lifestyle choices alone should never cost someone their right to parent.

Who is the "we" who decided to go with it?

Sum of all homo sapiens.

I can't remember taking a worldwide vote on the subject.

There's nothing innately democratic in our species. Democracy is just one of the mechanisms that we sometimes use to make some decisions. We use it way less than money mechanism as you probably noticed.

Yeah, but it used to be like a good drug and now its like a bad drug.

Disabling my Facebook account helped for me. That was easily the most "bad drug" internet site I was on.

I appreciate the attempt to hide the AI slop style of the documentation, but it still very difficult to read and understand.

Yeah. I am a professor and I see a lot of other professors saying they are pivoting to "Teaching AI". I tell them I am pivoting harder to teaching fundamentals because using AI is easy. Its the knowledge which is hard.