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This is a reasonably well supported and compelling argument that both the decreased independence in the real world and the complete freedom of companies to hijack their brains in the digital world are, combined, the cause of poor mental health of the "anxious generation", born after 1995 or so. His solutions are largely common sense, with my main "critique" being his idea that an age verification vendor that checked IDs to "anonymously" verify ages without giving the information to sites would be anything but a privacy nightmare.
His argument for the value of play as crucial developmentally and that humans are "antifragile" and need occasional moderate stressors and risk to develop a reasonable comfort level with uncertainty in the real world as compelling. This is well worth reading, and even moreso if you have a young kid.
This is a reasonably well supported and compelling argument that both the decreased independence in the real world and the complete freedom of companies to hijack their brains in the digital world are, combined, the cause of poor mental health of the "anxious generation", born after 1995 or so. His solutions are largely common sense, with my main "critique" being his idea that an age verification vendor that checked IDs to "anonymously" verify ages without giving the information to sites would be anything but a privacy nightmare.
His argument for the value of play as crucial developmentally and that humans are "antifragile" and need occasional moderate stressors and risk to develop a reasonable comfort level with uncertainty in the real world as compelling. This is well worth reading, and even moreso if you have a young kid.
There's a bit of overlap developmentally with The Anxious Generation, but this is also an interesting presentation of how we got to the point we are today, with hyper-polarization, the idea that words are violence, and the messaging that anyone who doesn't agree with you shouldn't be allowed to have a voice at all.
There's a bit of overlap developmentally with The Anxious Generation, but this is also an interesting presentation of how we got to the point we are today, with hyper-polarization, the idea that words are violence, and the messaging that anyone who doesn't agree with you shouldn't be allowed to have a voice at all.
Added to listIntelligencewith 76 books.
It's hard to put a finger on who exactly to recommend this to. There are portions (starting with the very beginning) that are excellent, hyper accessible narrative illustrations of important ideas, and these I would suggest to anyone. However, some of the other sections are much more abstract and technical, with a much more challenging train of thought to keep up with, that are likely to be confusing without some level of background.
I also, while I do find some of the research inspired by the questions interesting, fundamentally don't care a lot about abstract, pedantic debates about definitions of things like conciousness or free will, and there's a level of that here. However, where he eventually lands is largely consistent with my intuition that makes many of these discussions tedious to me. The arbitrary, meaningless debate is arbitrary and meaningless because, in order to keep it alive, the people perpetuating it have to abstract away more and more of any of the purely theoretical distinctions as their "gotchas" are demonstrated to be nonsensical. For me, this leads to "OK, if this theoretical difference never can be measured and never affects anything, in what context would it have any meaning?". He doesn't present it identically, but he gets to a similar place.
Also worth noting that this is fairly old now, and there are some points where it shows its age. However, with those caveats, this is worth reading and the model is a useful one.
It's hard to put a finger on who exactly to recommend this to. There are portions (starting with the very beginning) that are excellent, hyper accessible narrative illustrations of important ideas, and these I would suggest to anyone. However, some of the other sections are much more abstract and technical, with a much more challenging train of thought to keep up with, that are likely to be confusing without some level of background.
I also, while I do find some of the research inspired by the questions interesting, fundamentally don't care a lot about abstract, pedantic debates about definitions of things like conciousness or free will, and there's a level of that here. However, where he eventually lands is largely consistent with my intuition that makes many of these discussions tedious to me. The arbitrary, meaningless debate is arbitrary and meaningless because, in order to keep it alive, the people perpetuating it have to abstract away more and more of any of the purely theoretical distinctions as their "gotchas" are demonstrated to be nonsensical. For me, this leads to "OK, if this theoretical difference never can be measured and never affects anything, in what context would it have any meaning?". He doesn't present it identically, but he gets to a similar place.
Also worth noting that this is fairly old now, and there are some points where it shows its age. However, with those caveats, this is worth reading and the model is a useful one.
