We have a mental health epidemic that no one is willing to acknowledge and it is caused by the internet and the news media.
I'd like to try to keep this thread roughly about the podcast, so it would be good if the discussion about the internet could be continued in another thread, please.
David
And the internet is bad for mental health - which cannot be good for spiritual development or discerning truth.
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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?JEAN M. TWENGE SEPTEMBER 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
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The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.
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Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
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Is Social Media Contributing to Rising Teen Suicide Rate?by Elizabeth Chuck, Oct 22, 2017.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-contributing-rising-teen-suicide-rate-n812426
Recent studies have shown a rise in both teen suicides and self-harm, particularly among teenage girls Sadie's age.
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And just this past week, researchers in the U.K. published similar discoveries in a study on self-harm that showed a dramatic increase in the number of adolescent girls who engage in it: Self-harm rose 68 percent in girls ages 13 to 16 from 2011 to 2014, with girls more common to report self-harm than boys (37.4 per 10,000 girls vs. 12.3 per 10,000 boys).
Part of the problem is that internet apps are designed to make you use them compulsively. It's not just that they use up all your time. They destroy your attention span. There are kids on the reddit meditation forum who say they can't meditate for more than a few minutes. And reading news and debating in forums etc causes many people a lot of stress. It is hard to get in tune with the spiritual "vibe" when you are stressed.
See quotes below: Facebook insiders admit they are destroying society and they knew what they were doing.
(And anything with likes and visual or audio notifications, is part of the problem. That includes skeptiko, e-mail, and pretty much every discussion or comment forum. But it also involves auto-play video's, daily streaks to keep you coming back every day, hiding the clock so you don't know how long you've been using the app, and games that use repetitive music to put you in a trance like state.)
Sean Parker (Founding president of Facebook): Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability (We Are Dopamine Addicts)
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, well you're a conscientious objector that's okay you don't have to participate, but you know we'll get you eventually.'
And like, I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it begins, it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
If the thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it, that thought process was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.
It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
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Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Nir Eyal is showing software designers how to hook users in four easy steps. Welcome to the new era of habit-forming technology.by Ted Greenwald in technologyreview.com
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535906/compulsive-behavior-sells/
Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.
Is the Internet destroying your attention span? We asked an expert. By Simon Hill, digitaltrends.com
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/internet-age-attention-spans-experts-weigh-in/
“Think about the way digital information is conveyed, as short bits of information,” said Dr. Greenfield. “The idea of working on something in-depth over a long period of time is falling out of favor, because people are Googling, reading the first sentence of whatever comes up and then they’re done. People are using the Internet this way because most of the time they find what they want. When you find what you want you get a slight hit in your pleasure neurotransmitter because you’re getting satisfied, and as long as you get that hit you’re going to be more likely to keep doing it. We’re reinforced by that positive experience.”More:
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“A concern that we have,” said Dr. Greenfield, “is that if you’re not using some of these deeper capacities for thinking, because you’re using a digital device as a section of your brain, then those skill-sets will atrophy.”
How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design EthicistTristan Harris May 18, 2016
https://journal.thriveglobal.com/ho...ian-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown.
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I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.
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I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
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And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
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By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.
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Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets
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If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
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When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
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When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
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When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
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When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
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When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.
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Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
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Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
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Hijack #4: Social Approval
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When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place.
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
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Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts.
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Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
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News feeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause, reconsider or leave. It’s also why video and social media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook autoplay the next video after a countdown instead of waiting for you to make a conscious choice (in case you won’t).
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
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Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any deferred inbox).
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Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons
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For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.
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Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices
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Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.
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For example, NYTimes.com lets you “make a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they send you an email with information on how to cancel your account by calling a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Lastly, apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.
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People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click to see which tweet got retweeted”) and escalate from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.
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I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands.
Smartphones Are Weapons of Mass Manipulation, and This Guy Is Declaring War on Them: Tristan Harris thinks big tech is taking advantage of us all. Can its power be used for good?by Rachel Metz October 19, 2017
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...lation-and-this-guy-is-declaring-war-on-them/
... it persuades us to spend as much time as possible online, with tactics ranging from Snapchat’s snapstreaks to auto-playing videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook.
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... because tech companies’ business models largely depend upon advertising revenue, it’s not really in their best interest to push us toward, say, getting off the social network du jour and going outside to hang out with friends ...
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... a growing body of research suggests that the use of social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter may have negative consequences, like increasing your chances of depression or social isolation. Indeed, simply having your phone around could lower your cognitive capacity.
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“Everything [Facebook] knows about me can be used to persuade me toward a future goal,” he says. “And it’s very powerful; it knows exactly what would persuade me, because it has persuaded me in the past.
And the news media is another conspiracy to make profits by making you compulsive (crazy):
5 Ways To Stay Sane In An Era Of Non-Stop Outrage By David Wong David Wong, March 01, 2017
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-to-stay-sane-in-era-non-stop-outrage
Hey, you know what happens when you read something really enraging on the internet? You get a hit of dopamine. And even though it's a "bad" feeling, you immediately want to feel it again, because anything is better than being bored. Well, people who know how to manipulate this mechanism rule the world. Here's what you need to know now:
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Ignore Headlines Telling You To Feel An Emotion
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Remember That People Literally Get Paid To Upset You
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Know That If You Can Be Trolled, You Can Be Controlled
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I've learned 100 times more about Spirituality in the last 20 years than I would have if the Internet did not exist.
I'm old enough to remember spending an hour each way riding my bike down to the University library just to read books about Buddhism and martial arts before I was old enough to check them out.
I simply try to avoid threads drifting on to a different subject - particularly podcast threads.The other thread was about spiritual practices. Phenomena that interfere with spirituality are relevant to the topic of the thread (see below). But compulsive use of the internet is something people don't want to acknowledge. It hits too close to home. Skeptiko members may be suffering from it. Skeptiko-forum is complicit in causing it. So we have to have this discussion in a ghetto.
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Why do you think this location is a ghetto?
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What do you mean by a person being “spiritual” Jim?
I'm with Charlie on this one. I want to share a post of mine from an NDE Facebook group which I am part of. I've sort of shared this in different forms on this forum, and I know many here do not agree with the assessment, but below are MY beliefs on the matter as it pertains to what I call "evidence based spirituality" being shared and discussed via internet. (in a nutshell, what I mean below by what I think is the truth of the matter is that we are spiritual beings who are here to increase the quality of our consciousness and share and increase love.) Maybe Im overly optimistic, but I think its possible that it will lead to a spiritual revolution at some point, maybe not 10 years down the road, maybe not 100, but 500 years from now? I think its absolutely plausible. And I DO feel that we have (despite our immense problems) gotten GENERALLY better as a society with regards to compassion for others and co-operation etc. I don't necessarily believe that this is due to the internet of course, but if we get even a little better as a societal whole, that has positive spiritual implication. Here are my thoughts:
"What an incredible opportunity we present day humans have. Never before have we had the ability to share information and learn about others experiences like this. If I had lived 50 years ago, what could I learn about NDEs? Absolutely nothing. Not even a single book. Now we have books, videos, interviews, and the ability to converse with experiencers daily (on pages like this one). The more I learn about the nature of reality and spirituality, the more grateful I am to have the opportunity to do so. 100 percent of the previous population did not have this information available, and therefore lacked opportunity to understand things in the way which we now find ourselves able to do. And this is just the beginning. I don’t know that it will happen this way, but an opportunity in the future to essentially prove the spiritual realm through personal testimony, veridical NDE research, past life memory study, medium research (see Dr Julie Beischel’s double blind testing of mediums), and maybe even quantum physics may very well gradually present itself to us due to our new ability to share and learn. Take advantage of this opportunity, press on and keep learning and keep speaking and sharing the truth. If everybody believed what we know is true, 90 percent of the worlds problems would be gone. We have a long way to go, but the seeds are being planted."
When you develop the empathic mind, you change your relationship to the universe and other people and living organisms. You feel a connection to others, to all things, and this diminishes the ego. When you are not feeling selfish you can love more freely and forgive more freely and you are more tolerant.
Don't you mean, that you need the truth about spirituality?Science has set us back 1000's of years with regard to spirituality. You don't need truth to be spiritual. All you need is love.
Don't you mean, that you need the truth about spirituality?
I’m not clear on exactly what you mean by spirituality