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Comment by jhawleypeters | Hacker News Reader

This study focuses on adolescents because they have data available for a large cohort. I’m curious what one would find with adults.

I’m morbidly curious what the world’s various intelligence (espionage) outfits have attempted, studied, and concluded in terms of manipulating large numbers of people via the internet.

Many negative tropes I see repeated ubiquitously online make me think about mass demoralization, anger, hopelessness, etc.

I realize this may seem off topic to some, this is just where my mind goes when I see a title like this one.

Edited

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Before considering deliberate manipulation you need to account for contagion and memeiness among the population by default. That's certainly a nontrivial phenomenon, and possibly so dominant that manipulation is no more than a sideshow.

Running HN has shifted my priors on this point because, at least in our little pond, claims of deliberate manipulation almost always turn out to be unsupported by data.

If that's the case then detectable (if a magnitude or two weaker) pulses of the same phenomenon should have followed the widespread availability and access to the printing press and perhaps the telephone.

Moral panics over communications technologies are nothing new. Certain types of people just like to performatively worry about anything that empowers other people.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/texting-isnt-first...

“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” wondered the Knights of Columbus in a 1926 meeting. “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”

Others worried that the inverse would occur—that it would be so easy to talk that we’d never leave each other alone. “Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions,” complained an American professor in 1929. And surely it couldn’t be healthy to talk to each other so much. Wouldn’t it create Too Much Information?

“We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,” a London writer moaned in 1897. Others fretted that the telephone sped up life, demanding instant reactions. “The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection,” wrote a British newspaper in 1899. “It does not improve the temper, and it engenders a feverishness in the ordinary concerns of life which does not make for domestic happiness and comfort.”

Young ladies, some fretted, were at romantic risk. “The serenading troubadour can now thrum his throbbing guitar before the transmitter undisturbed by apprehensions of shot guns and bull dogs,” a magazine article in Electrical World noted. Scamsters loved the phone.

“It changed people’s ideas of social trust,” notes Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and author of When Old Technologies Were New. We could no longer read someone based on face-to-face social cues.

The moral panic is real, and warranted.

> Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?

Proven, the telephone (especially with integration of computer) has made men less active and more lazy. Obesity and media addiction skyrocketing. Cops called on kids playing outside.

> Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?

Confirmed. When I was a kid, we just went to a friend's house to knock to see if they wanted to play. Nobody does that anymore, and so much spirit of adventure has been lost. Everyone is glued to their pocket phones.

> it would be so easy to talk that we’d never leave each other alone. [...] Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions

Also confirmed. Constant addiction-engineered notifications from social media apps. Everyone always chatting. People are losing the ability to walk up to strangers and strike up conversation.

> Wouldn’t it create Too Much Information?

Sure did. First we had phone books to find peoples' contact. Then we got search engines and shift through websites. Now there's so much garbage most services just let it rot, and we're looking to AI to organize it all (good luck).

> the telephone sped up life, demanding instant reactions

Happened. There's no time for things to play out and integrate it anymore. It happens, it spreads instantly to all corners of the earth, and people suffer without having any time to ponder the ramification. Mental contagion is a real phenomena.

> The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection

Confirmed. Everyone is glued to their screens, avoiding deep and difficult conversations. The screen instructs them how to think, what to say, and especially what to buy.

> It does not improve the temper, and it engenders a feverishness in the ordinary concerns of life which does not make for domestic happiness and comfort.

Yup. People get so angry and worked up about social media. In particular, old single women of tiktok are convincing younger women to divorce their husbands over nothing, leading to lifetime of loneliness and misery. Half of all western women are projected to be childless and alone forever. Most of them will regret it.

> Young ladies, some fretted, were at romantic risk.

Dating apps have decimated romance. Ladies stuck on promiscuous hypergamy, "dating" a tiny percentage of men. Romance is the prime motivator for men to work hard, so this has far-reaching repercussions.

> It changed people’s ideas of social trust [...] We could no longer read someone based on face-to-face social cues.

People don't even interact face-to-face anymore, and when they do, they are clueless to cues as texting has none.

Thank you, that’s parsimonious and makes sense.

Besides the BS article, there is again some truth in the opinions expressed.

In general, the epigenetics express themselves at a rate almost double the baseline in homes where at least one parent is also suffering a disorder while raising the children, or there is some form of abuse. It is well documented, placing children in a low-stress stable environment with "normal" adoptive caregivers early in life can cut the expression of most disorders in half.

In terms of development, around 70% of your personality is who you were around as a child. It is not "contagious", but rather an aggregated developmental result governed by culture, social and financial stressors.

Interestingly, if you are intellectually gifted most will see a certain resilience to these challenges. However, sometimes a kid is just wired wrong (that other 1% no one talks about), and will pose a persistent issue for the entire community from an early age.

Governments have weaponized village idiots since the dawn of civilization, but in general most Scientists that study people tend to exclude the antisocial from their field given the horrific mistakes of the past.

I would recommend behavioral biology and abnormal psychology as electives in first year. And no, anyone under the age of 14 should not be on the public internet in my opinion, as at around 12 ones prejudices and values become your default bias.

I personally don't think Google should be monitoring the habits of children, or tagging people with electronic devices.

If you want conspiracy, there are too many to choose from... some fake... some plausible... some hilarious... and some horribly real. Have a wonderful day =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

> I’m curious what one would find with adults.

I think the polical class will be very interesting to study. Maybe they will also find new disseases.

You don't need the internet, it's been done for centuries. It is a derivative of mimesis which is biologically encoded colloquially as 'monkey see, monkey do'. You don't even need espionage to influence group think dynamics and mass hysteria. Want to start a stampede? Start running fast away from a group of people.

Trump is the poster boy for transmitting disinformation. The solution is to teach and promote critical thinking but that has been weaponized into 'do your own research' which conveniently neglects to do the critical thinking component that research requires.

The internet is the largest psychological attack surface ever invented. It's exactly the right response to have.

In general, I don't think it is that simple... but horrible people do tend to be more memorable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTUrdJ6atRA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgXlN0x--u8

Have a great day =3

I'm not blaming individual people I am talking about emergent behaviors.

Dr. John Calhoun did many experiments with mammalian behavioral shifts with population growth. Some seem upset by his works findings, but it does seem to predict developmental stages of aggression, the "Beautiful Ones", and cognitive deterioration in social mammals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U

I would recommend getting out for an early walk everyday (especially when you don't feel like it), as spending too much time around news/catastrophe nonsense is bad for your health.

Have a great day, and I just found a surprise ice-cream cookie bar in the freezer I forgot about... hope your day gets that awesome too. =3

Dr. Calhoun's research, if you can call it that, has been roundly debunked due to flawed experimental design, lack of replication, anthropomorphizing, etc.

If you're interested in more up-to-date and relevant research on the sociological impact of the internet, I recommend checking out Sherry Turkle and her associates, or reading some stuff from RAND on psychological war, and then branching out from there. Jaques Ellul is also a more 'liberal arts' way into this field that I'm betting you'd enjoy.

"Psychological war" sounds very dramatic, but Ms. Turkle is a sociologist with a specialization in human personality study. Hardly qualified to be an evolutionary neuroscientist, but maybe she is a good therapist.

"Not my monkey... not my circus..." as they say... =)

Indeed, Dr. Calhoun had many peers with better resources to study the phenomena. I agree that his initial interpretation was unexpected, but the later data, several papers, and peer-review is likely of better quality. Note the film clip documents a follow up study done with "Rat Utopia" that covers several of the unanswered questions of whether ecological carrying capacity features.

Personally, when I last reviewed the work I was more interested in shifts in the rates of aggression in pseudo-tournament species. Yet my interests shifted to neuromorphic computing long ago, and unfortunately it is off-topic for this thread.

Have a wonderful day, =)

I enjoyed this exchange.

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