Comment by lm28469

Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.

If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith

>This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.

>Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.

>Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.

This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.

yeah, that makes sense. Everything has a cost, TANSTAFL.

This is the second philopsiphical point of economics. Everything is a choice between costs.

Im curious how else you would put it?

I don't recall violent video games and rap music influencing elections.

Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.

Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101