Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Young people are also exposed to immense echo chambers that operate as runaway feedback loops, which manipulate their emotions, political views, and so on. This leads to extreme perspectives that are detached from reality. These two paragraphs from the article demonstrate this:

> Positive feelings such as optimism were reported least among the respondents, researchers said. In fact, 77% said that they considered the future to be frightening, and 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study.

> For many young people, those feelings of fear and worry affect their ability to function, too, results showed. More than 45% of the respondents said the way they feel about climate change adversely affects their day-to-day lives.

As a UW Professor of Atmospheric Science said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-exi...), climate change is a problem but not an existential threat. Yet young people seem to think that humanity is doomed. That Professor faced much critique for holding such a balanced and nuanced view, and activists have tried to get him fired. Such aggressive attempts at narrative control, in institutions and social media, leads to extreme views among the young.

What makes young people more exposed to echo chambers (and why more immense?) than older adults? Younger people seem to me to be more likely to be exposed to more new people, more new ideas, and more diversity of opinions than adults.

Young people, such as those belonging to Gen Z, spend far more time on social media relative to other age groups and did not experience a non-digital world at all (unlike millennials and earlier generations). I also think they are less exposed to new ideas or a diversity of opinions - college campuses are culturally and politically far more monolithic than ever before, and are incredibly hostile to free speech and diversity of thought, particularly where it goes against progressive/leftist world views. Cancel culture, deplatforming, and the injection of politics into even K-12 education have created a large pipeline that amounts to a decentralized indoctrination in effect.

same reason hackernews has been declining for years

One advantage of being older is that you have a chance to see panics come and go. For example, it would be a challenge to convey to you the utter certainty and despair that existed in the 70s with the prevailing belief that we would be running out of oil in the next few decades and action was needed _now_ (pounds fist on the table). I think everyone then who held these views would be astonished by the oil capacity available to us today. This intense emotional certainty isn’t unique to that issue. It happens again and again. Some of us have seen these panics before. The worrisome part for me is that many people here are giving themselves anxiety in part because their information stream and commentary lacks balance.

Indeed why are young people nervous? it's only skyrocketing property prices, gig economy, obliteration of property rights by software, financialization of the economy and ecological collapse. Nothing to be worried about

When is the last time the world wasn’t falling apart?

Nothing is wrong with the gig economy besides the general problem of health insurance being tied to your job.

What makes you think any of those beliefs are detached from reality?

Those perspectives can be said to be extreme, but I’m not seeing you make a case that they are “detached from reality.”

Humanity isn’t “doomed”. Climate change may affect hundreds of millions and even so it is far away from an existential threat to humans. It also isn’t something that should cause someone to lose the ability to function day-to-day. That suggests immaturity, fragility, and a cognitive distortion (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing).

> Climate change may affect hundreds of millions and even so it is far away from an existential threat to humans.

So? WW2 was not an existential threat. Covid is not an existential threat. If you lose your job, your house, and spend the rest of your life as homeless, that's still not an existential threat to humanity. It's a meaningless criterion.

Humans are pretty resourceful; I expect we'll survive in some form or another. But climate change absolutely is an existential threat to ecosystems, biodiversity, food security, water security, political stability, etc. The fact that there will likely be humans somewhere on earth carving out an existence is not exactly comforting.

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