From the abstract of [0]:
Microplastics and nanoplastics [..] particles can penetrate the skin, especially if the skin barrier is compromised. [they] may cause oxidative stress, trigger inflammation, and induce senescence. This article calls for research on the topic and advocates for plastic-free or bio-degradable alternatives.
I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze. I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective. A justified anger there, I think, at a culture that perpetuates and celebrates this form of relating.
Insecurity, I suspect, befalls more prominently the indoctrinated women that are catering to male expectations of beauty and ease. The successful feminists don't care if you're only screwing sexbots. If you are, it'll be great to have you off the market anyway. A filter for the men who won’t meaningfully connect.
How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.
A human teacher can see the problem from the students perspective and understand the error they make and why they make it. No current ai would be able to achieve this.
But alas, few human teachers can or will take the time to do this per student. Infinite time and patience really are the ai's superpower here IMO.
I think your impression has merit and labeling people as 'sick' or 'broken' or any of the diagnoses in psychology literature, that imply just about the same, can keep people stuck identifying with their afflictions. And that there's some great value in religion that we've not found a good replacement for.
I also believe that one can go without facing deeply traumatic events for an entire life and seem to many on the outside to be doing much better than one who goes the difficult path of deconstructing oneself and their family history.
And I think our unhappiness and that of our children is well explained by our late-stage-capitalist, individualistic cultures and the rise of technology that profits from (ill-)serving our social needs.
'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Thats an interesting point about the age of manipulative sales strategies! I didn't consider it.
And I agree with your position that emotions change over a rather long timescale.
In fact that's exactly why I'm concerned about the speed of technological development in psychology and data science. I fear that it's no longer salesperson vs consumer. Now it's salesalgorithm and a large chunk of the behavioral science academic efforts vs consumer. The power that the producer wields is increasing at a much faster rate than the emotional awareness of the consumer.
My perpective is influenced by the Center of Humane Tech's positon. The people behind 'The social dillema' documentary and the 'Your undivided attention' podcast. Manipulative capabilities are increasing FAST. And I believe that this speed of change is unprecedented.
I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed.
Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in evoking emotion; visual stimuli, carefully crafted music, decades of psychology research, etc.
And while we've had a chance to evolve strategies against human to human manipulation (doors, perhaps, and various subtle triggers of distrust), the ad environment is a very recent development.
I agree with you that a pos/neg divide is clearer and more straight forward to construct.
Reading your comment also evoked in me imaginations of political repression.
Anger and fear are really important emotions signifying "this situation is not meeting my needs". Social Media can abuse these for profit probably precicely because they play this important role. In this light, a ban on recommending negative content seems really dangerous. Any content that expresses dissatisfaction with the political status quo is likely to contain some 'negative' (I suggest the term 'challenging') emotions.
So while 'addictiveness' is, like you say, really difficuly to measure - I prefer we try.
I think, in order to have the desired effect, the deterrant must be in proportion to the resources of the transgressor as a whole entity.
If its not, Apple can afford to behave anticompetitively with their appstore, hold on to an illegal position of power and use that to extract revenue for the other lines of business that they're in.
Morally, if we fine violations to the speed limit in proportion to the context of the transgression only it will not adapt to the income of the transgressor. That makes it practically legal for rich people to drive as fast as they wish.
I both agree and disagree, in that;
- the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network.
And
- Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.
At worst the assesment will be dysfunctional often and at best this can empower local governance (ideally, "the people") to decide, as you say, on what businesses they'd like to host.
I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment and your behavior. I'm grateful for everyone of us out there working with strong moral boundaries. Thank you!
I also disagree with your perspective on corporations. To me they seem very much alive - in a less recognisable form, more complex than we can grasp with human minds.
I argue mainly because I'd like to keep the term as something free of judgment. A group of people that comes together as a larger body or organism can be quite beautiful too.
I'm curious, do you have a counterpart to "capital" and "property" in your analogy?
I think capitalism facilitates specialization - and that quite effectively at scale. Specialization can occur without capitalism, too. There are other systems to coordinate specialists.
You might reframe this as an adversarial attack.
So far these are constructed against specific classifiers.
I wonder just how much common taste there is left to mine.
There are a lot of low wattage brains working in an attention maximizing context (the music industry) on pleasurable audio.
I'm a big fan of reducing the webs addictive footprint. So thank you for building this, I hope it gains traction :)
I've found ublock origin's "picking"-feature quite powerful. It allows you to just pick and permanently remove any element on a page. My youtube pretty much looks just like what this addon does. I think with a simpler UI it could empower many more people to handle their online addictions. This seems especially important on mobile and sadly also particularly difficult.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41207769/