I have no experience with this, but there are apps you can get which turn the screen from full colour to greytone. apparently it really cuts out the addictive quality for a lot of people.
I think getting good at getting good at things is also good to do at that age. I'm in favour of encouraging kids to study broadly, but I've also ready very compelling accounts of where encouraging a kid's narrow interests got the child to learn ancillary things much more quickly (though TBF, that child was deeply on the spectrum and perhaps not a typical example)
I'm not an expert either, but you might be interested in the book 'Superforecasting' by Tetlock and Gardner - they have done some (IMHO) very interesting research on predictions markets. It might be the kind of thing you're looking to research more of!
The ideology of growth being dealt a genuinely humiliating defeat would involve massive depopulation event anyway. It seems far better to shift away from growth-dependent economics before any humiliating defeat rather than hope the people who survive it happen to be well-versed in regenerative economics.
I've started a meetup group for the purpose of discussing how a grassroots effort could shift some of the resources of the growth-economy to a steady-state economy while the former is still in place, but interest has been miniscule in my midsized college town.
When you say 'fix' do you mean 'prevent a two-degree shift' or 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy'? Or do you mean we can avoid some survivable threshold higher than two degrees?
I agree that useful action is possible and important, but I'm starting to feel that our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change was sometime last decade or the one before.
OP here on a different device, a lot of people have been asking about my beef with Youtube, so I'll try and put what I noticed in a timeline.
1. Youtube comes out with the promise of revolutionizing video, I immediately love it because of its idiosyncrasy and unpredictability. Despite low production values, the videos are varied enough that I can always find something interesting and the algorithm is quite good at suggesting things I'll like.
2. Google acquires youtube, whether because of more money or improving the algorithm, the offerings get even better
3. Youtube merges with google+.
4. Youtube hires new management and begins modeling itself after the old cable companies whose lunch it had 'till now been happily eating.
5. Youtube's algorithms progressively play it safer with their recommendations, the youtube personalities I follow either become more mainstream (Joe Rogan) or increasingly complain of being arbitrarily demonetized (Phillip Defranco).
7. Present day
If you use Youtube as a substitute for television, it might not look like a decline. But I find television generally boring, and Youtube seemed to promise a general improvement. With a better algorithm for suggesting videos and a less hostile relationship to creators it still could be, but for years now it's been moving in the opposite direction on both counts.
I always give myself five minutes in which I can flip the coin as many times as I like, but at the end of that I have to go with the face that's showing. It's pretty interesting - I find myself hesitating when it's showing one face more and more. I'm sure part of it is just reinforcing an initial bias once I notice my own hesitation, but magnifying an existing bias is after all the point of the exercise.
I believe it was Charles Stross who had a character say "We would like to have Albert Einstein working in the patent office, but it still needs to function if we hire Mr. Bean".
Japan is probably more concerned about boosting their declining pop rate, which is inversely correlated with women's education, than expanding their economy in the short term and accelerating the population decline.
There is a school of philosophy that newton's laws of motion apply to the political realm - "any action taken to benefit a minority group will result in an equal and opposite counter-reaction".
I wouldn't be terribly far off if I described Sun Zu's "The Art of War" as Newton's laws of motion applied to game theory.
I don't understand why you can't tell them the reason you're leaving without burning a bridge - "I don't work well in an open-office environment, I found I was constantly distracted and inefficient. It's just not the right environment for me to thrive" isn't untrue or pointing fingers, and it's valuable feedback for your employer.
Discoverability seems to be a challenge on just about every streaming platform. It doesn't seem that difficult to write an algorithm that balances novelty with comfort, and yet nobody seems to have even moved in that direction. I'm not sure what the problem is, the discoverability problem seems to have gotten worse as machine learning has become more mainstream.
>What structures today are likely to survive long term?
The Georgia Guidestones come to mind. I've been quite interested in the pre-ice age golden age theory lately but I think the part missing from your analysis is that we're farther ahead on a chemical/particle tech branch than on a social engineering tech branch. We've essentially scaled up competing warbands to a planetary scale - a class 1 civilization we are not, and seem more likely to develop one on Mars than Earth.
Building the Georgia Guidestones probably cost much less in human terms than a comparably complex henge, but we lack the mindset to collectively see the value in it. To make a gaming analogy of your point, I would say we're objectively ahead on one branch of the tech tree but we overlook simpler technologies on branches we haven't explored yet, to the point of not realizing other civilizations were farther ahead in some regards while being behind in others.