Commenters are criticizing the man for knowing that cell phones exist and for being surprised by it.
I bought smartphones before the iPhone.
I stood in line for four hours to buy the first iPhone (never again).
I still use an iPhone.
Yet, I am regularly surprised by how often everyone is looking at their phones.
(Context: I live in a rural area outside a metro area and don’t go there often, except for work.)
When their kid is at a crowded city park, the parent is glued to their phone.
When their kid is performing, the parent is glued to their phone, their thumb scrolling.
During any break from activity, they whip out their phones.
I used to be skeptical about the claim that devices contribute to societal brain rot through dopamine hits. However, the more I pay attention, the more I notice it. Even though I'm quite disciplined, I still catch myself instinctively pulling out my phone.
I can easily see this man having that sincere thought. You know smartphones exist, but you have no idea how much they are used.
I truly believe we are at a stage where one could argue that smartphones qualify as cybernetics.
1. Insofar as no apps on phone, minimal social media usage at all, and willful focus on a return to my 70s/80s roots where I embrace active boredom doing nothing.
I did a week without my phone and it was astonishing how uncomfortable I was with… doing nothing. The act of just waiting for anything made me instinctively reach for the phone and when it wasn’t there… it was uncomfortable to not get that hit. Even after a week, it hadn’t gone away.
Ye. I mean it is bad for us as individuals and collective to constantly have an internet connected computer available.
I don't know what we should do about it though. Like any cure would be to authoritarian for my taste. Hope for culture change? Like how fronting the TV as the center of your family life at home is not hip anymore.
I am proposing that we should hope that we just sort it out without doing anything. I think that is like claiming that there is not some nice fix.
I for example am burned out on scrolling feeds since I consumed way too much memes on like some meme rating feed site I don't even remember the name of, before feeds was a thing.
So maybe people might just cut down on it by them self?
Was that feeling happening constantly at any time or only during the time you didn’t have anything else to do?
I do plenty of physical exercise during the day, and I don’t like to take with me the phone (because it’s big). When I go out for a walk I don’t take my phone with me (I walk around 40 min/day). When I read I don’t have my phone near me. Now, when I have done all the things I wanted to do during the day and it’s time to sit on the sofa, yep, I take my phone and I would get bored without it I think.
Not scientific, but when I snoop, I most often see the thumb scrolling and various incarnations of the video shorts apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Probably any of the above except work? It's indeed a tool for any kind of distraction you want/whichever road you take (i.e. whichever app you open) you'll find said distraction. HN counts too. (Ironically I'm typing this as I sit on the toilet.).
I agree on HN, though I think it's markedly different as it moves slow enough that you can just check it once or twice a day and get most everything you want. Whereas a lot of other social media is an unlimited feed of everything, ephemerally, and can make you feel like that if you blink, you'll have missed something.
I do check HN from my phone, typically in the mornings and night when I have downtime and don't want to watch TV or read a book. But I can't say I've ever been at a park, bar, or airport lounge and just itching to see what was going on HN this second.
Even when people are not looking at the phone, they need to know it's nearby.
Some young people feel anxiety without their phones to the level they don't go out even for a few minutes without a phone. They still lose their phone inside their homes, but they feel comfortable because they know it's nearby. But if you are asking someone to come to help carry something, takes max 2 minutes, and they refuse until they find their phone. It is same for taking out the trash, and visiting the nearby shop (5 min max).
Ironically, I was taking out trash a couple hours ago, and left my phone in the house, and somebody called me, and when I got back they no longer needed me.
Oh you mean like if the battery runs out? I just make sure it never does. I thought they meant like if I lose my phone, but in that case I could just go home and grab my card and pay with my card.
I don't even have a wallet. Also, a big reason to avoid cash is that you never know who was its previous owner, and whether they washed their hands. Unless you can somehow get factory new cash.
That's correct. You should never touch a public door handle with your bare hands. And often you don't have to. Many doors would be opened for you if you just pushed them, and some would even open themselves on their own if they saw that you wanted to get through. But, hold on, let me blow your mind even further: you should also never eat food that fell on the ground, even if it was less than 3 seconds.
Sci fi authors imagined future worlds where reality would be masked by drugs.
The drugs have arrived. They just take the form of phone and computer screens which keep games, forums, but even selective news true or fake in front of our eyes, sometimes BS office memos. We don't know how to make drugs alter our vision, mood, perception of the world to outright provide a "better" one. But we don't really need them. We know how to achieve that with screens and software. (And for the rest, SSRIs and such can alter our mood without even bothering to change the stimulus.)
It is surprising when you look up (from your screen) in the train and see everyone captured by their own reality - which is our new shared reality? Kind of? Pretty close for sci-fi.
The BS office memo asks us to justify our usefulness by Monday fist thing or report to reactor shielding (too soon? too soon.)
I just spent several months helping someone who got released after 40 years. He got used to smartphones very quickly. He'd seen them in movies and TV, and they have tablets in most prisons these days to download music and movies and do texting.
Had to teach him how to pay with a debit card and PIN for everything as that wasn't a thing before he went in.
Indeed, while still in jail, this man surely knew smartphones existed. And, of course, basic usage of a smartphone is easy; it wouldn't be addictive if it was hard.
The point of this (low quality) article was that, after 30 years far from the usual life, the man points out juste 2 changes during the period: "Everybody is looking at their phones" and a 2023 wildfire. He knew people had smartphones, but I guess he didn't not know to what extent. It's a/the most important part of the life for many people.
Last week, I saw a couple riveted to their screens while walking their dog on the river's edge. The woman didn't raise her eyes when she caught and threw the stick the dog had brought. I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention.
Yeah that’s true. Movies and TV would not be very engaging if the characters were doing real life stuff like walking around face down barely aware of anyone around them.
So we depict this romantic view where the phone can do everything we need but nobody is addicted to it
The UI for smartphones was also designed for the lowest common denominator. It’s so intuitive that we laughed at my toddler as she tried to swipe on a physical picture frame to see the next photo.
I would imagine it would be much harder to adapt to T9 input. My boomer parent stubbornly refused to adopt cell phones early on and that mindset crippled them as the world pivoted to apps and touchscreens.
“All right already. Let’s see. Give me a second.” She scratches her chin while a wild animal screams within the Save-On. “I know—I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impress me with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?” I egg her on. “For example?”
…
“People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?”
Excerpt From
Girlfriend in a Coma
Douglas Coupland
This material may be protected by copyright.
It takes some self discipline and effort to use our phones in non-unhealthy ways. I'm still working on it myself: to configure software, notifications, reduce mindless scrolling.
I'm naturally curious and so I often find myself asking an AI chat bot about things: sometimes about random stuff but more often my AI chats are aligned with my learning goals, and I love that proximity to knowledge. I guess this could become a somewhat unhealthy behavior, but I don't consider it a problem yet.
For me the most important thing is to be mindful of the power and addictive tendency of our phones, and crucially for me: to use the phone as a tool, especially for creative endeavors.
The sad thing is that children are forced by the school to register google, facebook, and share stuff there. One can say that it is a matter of willpower, but I'd say that it is more like forcing them to carry drugs around and expect them to stay away from it.
I don't dislike talking to others. It's just hard for me to say what I want to say at the speed of normal conversation. I write more slowly and carefully, can edit what I've drafted, and check facts too, all before I hit the submit button.
You just need to find the right people to interact with, people who can match your pace and preferred level of articulation. It's not like they don't exist.
I just want to mention that although in general I dislike f2f communication, I'd love to talk about technical stuffs or hear other people passionately talking about technical stuffs. But again most people don't really have the luxury to find the right people to interact with. We weaklings don't control our own fate.
I think a lot of people give up. How many people on reddit or irc who actually get along with each other well organize meetups, or how many people still look for meetups to try and find compatible people?
Did any child? I think by the time we die we should have achieved some understanding and love with connecting with other humans by the tools given to us. It might be somewhat uncomfortable but the pros outweigh the cons.
For the most part, authentic experiences aren’t digital but the current generation are loosing what is.
In my opinion.
I've recently tried to get into urban sketching and spending any time observing figures in an urban scene makes this immediately obvious. So many people staring at phones everywhere you got. I'm equally guilty but once you start looking it is quite stark.
This is sad to me as the school bus was some of the best memories of my childhood. I don’t even know why particularly, but I think after being in cooped up in school all day we just got to act like fools and joke around on the bus. We even did this thing where we’d run as fast as we could to get the back seats of the bus.
Having typed all that I realized my kid is in a bus free school, we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Was more of a sign of the times for my era than a necessity for a good childhood but, if you’re on a bus with dozens of peers and all glued to your phones, it does feel like some missed opportunities
Yep people miss this a lot I think. The commuter trains used to be literally littered with discarded newspapers. Now it is a novelty to see one at all as people read things on their phones instead. People just don't like being bored (funnily enough).
We didn't live in some utopia before smartphones and 3g where everyone was nice and spoke to the person sitting next to each other in genuine conversation for their entire journeys. People were still selfish and rude. If a stranger (cluse is in the word there - strange-er... And that word has been around longer than phones) struck up a conversation with you on the bus or train you changed seat or carriage at the EARLIEST opportunity even then.
I still can't get used to it. It's totally creepy. Every time I'm out in public, it feels like the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where 99% of the people have been replaced with alien, but physically exact, replicas. And they're all just zombied out on their phones. It's an addiction that's run through the population completely wild and unaddressed. Often dangerously, scrolling messages while driving 75mph down the freeway. I used to host movie night, but we stopped because 5 minutes into the movie people were just ignoring the movie scrolling Instagram. You can do that at home, guys, jeez.
I don't know if you feel this, but there's also a sort of social pressure where if I'm in a situation and everyone's on their phones, it's hard for me to start up a conversation with someone since they seem 'focused' on whatever they're looking at. So I inevitably take out my own phone.
Not only this. Every group (work, school, uni) now uses whatsapp/other for communication, and if you own an older device you sometimes cant use said apps, so you are obligated to have a newer phone or else you will become isolated.
And Android/iOS has closed source code that makes you unable to update.
Especially with the proliferation of generative AI, I anticipate something of a tech backlash in the next decade, and performatively NOT looking at one's phone will be part of it.
I'm sure that this already exists to some extant in certain subgroups, but I'd bet a small amount of money that this will grow to be a visible trend.
It got really bad in the last couple of years, I think because the last group of people who were too old to get into technology are no longer seen much in public, so you go into a cafe and everyone, youth, adult or pensioner is just looking at their phone screen.
I saw this while browsing Hacker News on my phone. I wanted to say something but I don’t know what I could say without sounding hypocritical.
I guess I’ll just leave this comment and put my phone down. And try to be more mindful to not browse sites like this aimlessly. But I’ve tried that before too.
I think a society was just not meant to be this connected. When a brain is this hyperconnected you get problems and the world hyperconnected becomes sick.
>A hyperconnected brain is a brain with increased connectivity between regions, or hubs. This can be a response to neuropathology, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia.
>Hyperconnectivity in the brain can contribute to epilepsy by increasing the likelihood of seizures. This can occur due to a number of factors, including injury, disease progression, and changes in brain structure.
The world is in one big epileptic fit right now due to tech hyperconnectivity and I’m unsure how to fix that.
Perhaps in the future, governments could put strict caps on the amount of data one can download. For example, 1GB and no Internet for a person for the rest of the month.
I was a huge nerd for having a PDA in primary school. I still am surprised every time I step in public transport and see hundreds of heads bent down staring at tiny screens.
I don't know about others but I stare at my screen to avoid eye contact with strangers. It's not like I don't want to, it's that a part of me thinks that it is rude to be looking at others if you don't know them. Don't know from where it got instilled into my mind.
London is famous for the lack of any interaction on public transport. Before phones, the most organized people would read books or newspapers they'd purchased. Less organized people would read the free newspaper, look idly at the advertising, or stare out of the window — even in a tunnel.
Ha, I didn’t in primary school but people still thought it was nerdy. I had a Palm Tungsten T5 I used throughout high school. Mobile calendars and reminders were a lifesaver for me. I couldn’t organize myself on paper if my life depended on it.
A half-solution that seems to have cut my own phone time down was to remove any app that lets me browse. HN is the only aggregator/exception, because there isn't a lot of bullshit here without intellectual value.
Instead, if I want to use my phone I have to deliberately look for things.
This is too political for HN; and downplays any concerns regarding the alternative, that may have incentivized people to abstain rather than support either.
Trump was a reality show star, the other people were not.
I think you made it too political for HN by bringing up other politicians and concerns about them that are irrelevant when talking about the effect reality tv has had.
Trump gained 3 million votes post 2020; the Democratic Party lost 6 million. At best, you could say 3 million swung to Trump, and 3 million stayed home. Combine that with the first popular vote victory in 20 years (edit: for a republican candidate), and the quality or perception of the candidate is a statistically likely cause.
You’re making this explicitly political now by brining up vote counts. All the OC did was bring up the effect of reality TV shows on public consciousness. I reinforced that the person mentioned was relevant to their point.
You brought up completely unrelated voter turnout of other political figures completely irrelevant to any discussion of Reality TV and when reprimanded have brought up explicit vote counts, completely derailing into the political.
This is not appropriate for hacker news, by your own estimation. For shame: your behavior is hypocritical.
I was talking about Trump, who won the popular vote in 2024 (edit: The first Republican popular vote winner in 20 years), with 4 million less votes than Biden and 3 million votes more than Harris. If you think about it, the story is more about how badly the Democratic Party stumbled, than how well Trump performed.
The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly.
> The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly
This is true, but it doesn't invalidate grandparent's idea either. Maybe Dems should run a reality show star.
Why are you talking about Trump’s vote counts if any mention of a reality TV star in the context of reality TV is too political for Hacker News?
You were the first to say that something was too political for Hacker News and yet here you are in this thread, engaging in the most political discussion.
Note that Trump won the popular vote by a plurality, not a majority. Biden had a majority as did Obama both times. Bush also had a majority for his second term.
A popular vote win by a meager ~1.5% is nothing to cheer about [1]. In 2020, Biden won popular vote by 4.5% [2]
Even Hilary got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2016, by earning 2.1% more over Trump [3]
After you consider Republicans have been pushing for voter suppression and purging voter rolls in states for _decades_ [4]. We are just now seeing the effect. I suppose you can say it worked in the 2000 election and subsequent recounts in FL.
The laws and regulations around voter rights are not _constitutionally_ guaranteed. So unlike gun rights, voting rights can easily be taken away by the state. [5]
Democrats, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as a vote suppression tactic. (Salon and Wikipedia would certainly say so.) Democrats argue there is no evidence of a large scale organized fraud (no death by machete), so the worry is purely suppressive.
Republicans, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as an election integrity measure for preventing fraud. All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory. Republicans are concerned about slow, minor, unorganized fraud in lots of little places, that might add up to 2% (death by paper cuts).
Until a narrative wins, this will continue; and any election victories will be ignored by the other side.
> All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory.
Barely gets to 0.0001% fraud[0] (and the only 0.0001% finding is an estimate.) Even if you add up all the frauds on the link, I think you'd barely get past 0.002% fraud and that's over a multi-decade period.
You seem to be overlooking the numerous things other than roll clearing that can make it harder to vote. There are several more in this comment [1], and a large list of references in the comment linked in footnote 5 there.
Please explain to me why harder to vote has an automatic correlation with hurting Democratic, but not Republican, turnout; especially considering Republican’s greater propensity to live in rural areas with a longer distance to the voting booth.
you should look up how voter supression works and how it is designed to prevent what demographic from voting. additionally, one thing you failed to mention is that republicans are trying to “solve a problem” (voter fraud) which simply does not exist. there are SERIOUS consequences related to fradulent voting that it just does not make any sense for anyone to even attempt it. hence, this is absolutely never about voter fraud, it is now and always has been about voter supression. if republicans wanted everyone to vote they should be pushing for mandatory voting with serious not-paying-taxes like consequences. make every American vote, do it literally through the IRS. You file your tax return in an election year (well technically 04/15 of the following year) you have to show a proof you voted in the election or you get mandatory prison time. it is shit like this that would be about “hey, lets make sure EVERYONE eligible votes and see who wins” … the republicans only want to make sure to supress votes they know will not be kind to them :)
Please explain to me how this discussion of voter turnout and voter suppression in the lens of Democrat versus Republican is not too political for Hacker News?
Please remember that this entire sub thread was precipitated from you saying that the mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV is too political and now you are actually discussing politics.
You claimed the passing mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV on society was too political for Hacker News, and now you have descended into Democrat versus Republican percentage based figures on voting.
Republicans say that. But also, regarding pandemic voting provisions (vote-by-mail, same-day registration, early voting) proposed by Democrats in 2020: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” — Donald Trump, March 2020
I bought smartphones before the iPhone.
I stood in line for four hours to buy the first iPhone (never again).
I still use an iPhone.
Yet, I am regularly surprised by how often everyone is looking at their phones.
(Context: I live in a rural area outside a metro area and don’t go there often, except for work.)
When their kid is at a crowded city park, the parent is glued to their phone.
When their kid is performing, the parent is glued to their phone, their thumb scrolling.
During any break from activity, they whip out their phones.
I used to be skeptical about the claim that devices contribute to societal brain rot through dopamine hits. However, the more I pay attention, the more I notice it. Even though I'm quite disciplined, I still catch myself instinctively pulling out my phone.
I can easily see this man having that sincere thought. You know smartphones exist, but you have no idea how much they are used.
I truly believe we are at a stage where one could argue that smartphones qualify as cybernetics.
1. Insofar as no apps on phone, minimal social media usage at all, and willful focus on a return to my 70s/80s roots where I embrace active boredom doing nothing.
Addicted is right.
#sentfrommyiphone
I don't know what we should do about it though. Like any cure would be to authoritarian for my taste. Hope for culture change? Like how fronting the TV as the center of your family life at home is not hip anymore.
I remember much talk of "internet addiction" in the late 1990s, but rarely hear much of it anymore
That doesn’t seem like the default for most things in the universe.
I for example am burned out on scrolling feeds since I consumed way too much memes on like some meme rating feed site I don't even remember the name of, before feeds was a thing.
So maybe people might just cut down on it by them self?
My wife's vice seems to FB, but unsure if that's what everyone else is doing.
I do check HN from my phone, typically in the mornings and night when I have downtime and don't want to watch TV or read a book. But I can't say I've ever been at a park, bar, or airport lounge and just itching to see what was going on HN this second.
Some young people feel anxiety without their phones to the level they don't go out even for a few minutes without a phone. They still lose their phone inside their homes, but they feel comfortable because they know it's nearby. But if you are asking someone to come to help carry something, takes max 2 minutes, and they refuse until they find their phone. It is same for taking out the trash, and visiting the nearby shop (5 min max).
Ugh..I felt like I was on the high ground until I read that.
> Also, a big reason to avoid cash is that you never know who was its previous owner, and whether they washed their hands.
This is silly. By this same reasoning you should never touch a door handle in public.
Honestly that's a miserable way to live life IMO, being afraid to that extent.
How old are you if you don't mind sharing? I'm wondering to what extent COVID may have impacted the development of your views here.
> let me blow your mind even further: you should also never eat food that fell on the ground,
Yeah, not really comparable to opening a door lol
The drugs have arrived. They just take the form of phone and computer screens which keep games, forums, but even selective news true or fake in front of our eyes, sometimes BS office memos. We don't know how to make drugs alter our vision, mood, perception of the world to outright provide a "better" one. But we don't really need them. We know how to achieve that with screens and software. (And for the rest, SSRIs and such can alter our mood without even bothering to change the stimulus.)
It is surprising when you look up (from your screen) in the train and see everyone captured by their own reality - which is our new shared reality? Kind of? Pretty close for sci-fi.
The BS office memo asks us to justify our usefulness by Monday fist thing or report to reactor shielding (too soon? too soon.)
Had to teach him how to pay with a debit card and PIN for everything as that wasn't a thing before he went in.
Humans are very adaptable.
The point of this (low quality) article was that, after 30 years far from the usual life, the man points out juste 2 changes during the period: "Everybody is looking at their phones" and a 2023 wildfire. He knew people had smartphones, but I guess he didn't not know to what extent. It's a/the most important part of the life for many people.
Last week, I saw a couple riveted to their screens while walking their dog on the river's edge. The woman didn't raise her eyes when she caught and threw the stick the dog had brought. I wondered how the dog could be so obviously excited, despite the lack of attention.
I don't know how strong your prey drive is, but for me, chasing a thrown stick and returning it to the boss is good fun.
So we depict this romantic view where the phone can do everything we need but nobody is addicted to it
I would imagine it would be much harder to adapt to T9 input. My boomer parent stubbornly refused to adopt cell phones early on and that mindset crippled them as the world pivoted to apps and touchscreens.
…
“People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?”
Excerpt From Girlfriend in a Coma Douglas Coupland This material may be protected by copyright.
I hate the device and ecosystem itself.
Felt right to finally figure that out
It's not hard.
The devices are amazing tools, just don't use social media and you'll be fine.
It takes some self discipline and effort to use our phones in non-unhealthy ways. I'm still working on it myself: to configure software, notifications, reduce mindless scrolling.
I'm naturally curious and so I often find myself asking an AI chat bot about things: sometimes about random stuff but more often my AI chats are aligned with my learning goals, and I love that proximity to knowledge. I guess this could become a somewhat unhealthy behavior, but I don't consider it a problem yet.
For me the most important thing is to be mindful of the power and addictive tendency of our phones, and crucially for me: to use the phone as a tool, especially for creative endeavors.
Turns out most of us don't like talking to others.
I definitely don't. I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
It means you haven't met the right people yet, and that's a shame. Not just for you but for so many people missing out on the best parts of life.
But...
> I enjoy online interactions way more than face to face.
...that's still talking to others. Just in a different, er, arena.
Best part, all gadgets are locked up in a safe on arrival and returned when you leave.
https://www.yogameditation.com/
Maybe look into where that hatred comes from, because I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with me.
Earlier this week I took a bus at school ending time. Several children — roughly 8-12 years old — spent their whole journey on their phones.
Having typed all that I realized my kid is in a bus free school, we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Was more of a sign of the times for my era than a necessity for a good childhood but, if you’re on a bus with dozens of peers and all glued to your phones, it does feel like some missed opportunities
Taking a normal city bus home from school was wonderful for me. I think it was the first time I had some independence from my overprotective parents.
I could "miss" the bus, which gave me 15 minutes to look round the Warhammer shop (or similar) before the next bus.
I could more-or-less spontaneously go to a friend's house and phone my parents from there — they wouldn't be left waiting to pick me up from school.
We didn't live in some utopia before smartphones and 3g where everyone was nice and spoke to the person sitting next to each other in genuine conversation for their entire journeys. People were still selfish and rude. If a stranger (cluse is in the word there - strange-er... And that word has been around longer than phones) struck up a conversation with you on the bus or train you changed seat or carriage at the EARLIEST opportunity even then.
Ironically, I think we have never been as lonely and isolated as we are now.
And Android/iOS has closed source code that makes you unable to update.
Also, I am pretty sure that people won't even look at > 90 % of everything that they have captured.
I'm sure that this already exists to some extant in certain subgroups, but I'd bet a small amount of money that this will grow to be a visible trend.
Just a fun thought!
I guess I’ll just leave this comment and put my phone down. And try to be more mindful to not browse sites like this aimlessly. But I’ve tried that before too.
Being stuck in scroll mode for most of the day is soul killing.
>A hyperconnected brain is a brain with increased connectivity between regions, or hubs. This can be a response to neuropathology, such as autism, depression, or schizophrenia.
>Hyperconnectivity in the brain can contribute to epilepsy by increasing the likelihood of seizures. This can occur due to a number of factors, including injury, disease progression, and changes in brain structure.
The world is in one big epileptic fit right now due to tech hyperconnectivity and I’m unsure how to fix that.
Instead, if I want to use my phone I have to deliberately look for things.
Just like predators can also be prey. Some species mutually prey on each other.
All metaphors break down eventually.
I think you made it too political for HN by bringing up other politicians and concerns about them that are irrelevant when talking about the effect reality tv has had.
Trump gained 3 million votes post 2020; the Democratic Party lost 6 million. At best, you could say 3 million swung to Trump, and 3 million stayed home. Combine that with the first popular vote victory in 20 years (edit: for a republican candidate), and the quality or perception of the candidate is a statistically likely cause.
You brought up completely unrelated voter turnout of other political figures completely irrelevant to any discussion of Reality TV and when reprimanded have brought up explicit vote counts, completely derailing into the political.
This is not appropriate for hacker news, by your own estimation. For shame: your behavior is hypocritical.
The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly.
This is true, but it doesn't invalidate grandparent's idea either. Maybe Dems should run a reality show star.
You were the first to say that something was too political for Hacker News and yet here you are in this thread, engaging in the most political discussion.
They only need to change policy enough to keep from pissing off deep blue states and to flip a few swing states.
Even Hilary got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2016, by earning 2.1% more over Trump [3]
After you consider Republicans have been pushing for voter suppression and purging voter rolls in states for _decades_ [4]. We are just now seeing the effect. I suppose you can say it worked in the 2000 election and subsequent recounts in FL.
The laws and regulations around voter rights are not _constitutionally_ guaranteed. So unlike gun rights, voting rights can easily be taken away by the state. [5]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president...
[4] https://www.salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/
[5] https://hartmannreport.com/p/democracy-undone-the-texas-plac...
Democrats, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as a vote suppression tactic. (Salon and Wikipedia would certainly say so.) Democrats argue there is no evidence of a large scale organized fraud (no death by machete), so the worry is purely suppressive.
Republicans, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as an election integrity measure for preventing fraud. All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory. Republicans are concerned about slow, minor, unorganized fraud in lots of little places, that might add up to 2% (death by paper cuts).
Until a narrative wins, this will continue; and any election victories will be ignored by the other side.
Barely gets to 0.0001% fraud[0] (and the only 0.0001% finding is an estimate.) Even if you add up all the frauds on the link, I think you'd barely get past 0.002% fraud and that's over a multi-decade period.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935056
Please remember that this entire sub thread was precipitated from you saying that the mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV is too political and now you are actually discussing politics.
You claimed the passing mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV on society was too political for Hacker News, and now you have descended into Democrat versus Republican percentage based figures on voting.