I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just sealioning here:
Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids" milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are workable purely technically, but ignoring that, I have some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is really bad.
So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
If you have a hyperlexic child but the parents are not, nor are they well educated, most of the books quite early are going to male the parents uncomfortable. Even with educated parents, you get well meaning protective measures which are harmful to the child in the short and long term. Children even who arent big readers are harmed when their questions are deflected or ignored. Especially when it starts young. When your answers or you are uncomfortable towards an intelligent childs questions, especially as their parent, they pick up on that. You may intend well, you may want to shield them from the horrors inherent in their question, or prevent anxiety. But they still have the questions, they just find the answers themselves. They stop asking you for many reasons. Ultimately the result is you have left them alone with their questjons, and for bright children particularly the very young it does so much damage, that continues. They've in a very real way, been left alone by even very devoted parents.
I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok is bad.
If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful or malicious advice around body standards, that's one thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)
If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under a lens, that's another thing.
If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian viewpoints that are not available on your television, like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet another thing.
The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never see how they are fundamentally different from you nor why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by comparison.
My brother, a middle school teacher, was talking about TikTok yesterday. Every 2 years he gets a new batch of 10-year-olds.
They all have a “class chat”, and it is used daily for relentless cyber bullying. The current trend TikTok is pushing this month is to push the boundaries of calling black kids the n-word without explicitly saying the word. There is one little black girl in his class.
He says every class is the same, horror ideas pushed by edge lords TikTok algos push on the kids. Relentless daily bullying. And unlike bullying on the playground or at the boys and girls club.. there is no realistic way for adults to intercede beyond disconnecting their kid, shutting them out of the social context entirely.
but can your brother setup a class chat that he moderates?
I'm working on a simple chat app in Go as a learning project [0], you're welcome to use that, but honestly there are almost certainly better solutions out there, which he can actively moderate. Maybe a WhatsApp group, or something that can be used by a web interface (old forum techs?)
Group chats can be nice, I'm part of several acroyoga group chats and they're lovely, probably because adults who practice acroyoga tend to be nicer than middle schoolers.
My primary issue here was actually more about TikTok - I don’t think it’s right that software engineers get rich writing code that pushes “bullying challenges” on children to increase engagement and ad sales.
But: all other things equal, of I get to pick between “10-year-olds primary daily public forum is completely, cryptographically, devoid of any moderating adult presence whatsoever” and - what I had - 10-year olds have privacy but there are adults around that have a chance at picking up that things are going off the rails”
I think it’s mostly bad for a developing brain because it fuels dopamine-driven short attention span and on that level alone is comparable to zoning out on drugs. It is basically child maltreatment in the form of neglect, first parent-child-neglect, continued into self-neglect. Neglect as a silent form of abuse is one of the most damaging and difficult to treat in psychotherapy.
Your #1 reason is bobthepanda's #3 reason - exposes contrarian viewpoints. There isn't any reason in the abstract to think that Chinese propaganda is any worse than US propaganda. US propaganda is pretty stupid vis a vis promoting domestic prosperity.
What are the Chinese supposed to do here, influence the US to give up their manufacturing edge by outsourcing all the capital formation to Asia? Waste their economic surpluses on endless war? Promote political division by pretending that the president is an agent of a foreign country? The US political process throws up a startling number of own goals. The Chinese aren't savvy enough to outdo the US domestic efforts.
This is a naive view of propaganda: everyone always says "well, they're not trying to achieve <overtly obvious goal>" therefore there could be no benefit!
Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a startup but with much broader success criteria.
Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.
Well, no. It is good to listen to other people even if you think they don't have your best interests at heart. I can certainly see a security argument for restricting foreign media, but to get upset because literally one media source is owned by foreigners is too much.
The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit from the US suffering, much like the US has actually benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.
> Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.
Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what the Chinese think without going and listening to and reading things written by Chinese people and pushed by people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.
yes, but I think by your logic Hollywood movies are "propaganda"...
by making the main characters of a movie American, and giving them positive traits, you're 'obtaining a potential advantage' for every American that travels abroad is associated with positively portrayed fictional characters, or in biopics, historical characters.
The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.
Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).
Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]
> Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.
I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in communist communities as children.
It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd already be using that technique in the west to align everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant socialist regressions that keep cropping up.
Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and impossible to control, for good or ill.
> It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.
It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why listen to worse propaganda?
> > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.
> I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem.
This is truly laughable.
We would have never let the German government own ABC in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.
I always feel like this argument has a "doth protest too much" feel to it.
The decisions in the 1930s led to the most bloody and meaningless breakdown of communications in human history. One of the outcomes was the UN being set up by people saying, loosely speaking, "gee, we should listen to each others political stance more". I myself wouldn't cite the media policy in the decade prior to WWII as a success since it is hard to find a worse failure.
Besides; that has nothing to do with children. The Nazis didn't last an entire generation. They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.
> And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.
Again, Chinese media policy is an example of bad policy - I would advocate doing the opposite of them in that sphere. They're authoritarians. We want to intentionally copy their industrial policies after careful consideration.
Nations being unwilling to allow their rivals to own their domestic media has literally nothing to do with that. The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.
Also:
> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.
I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.
If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in, "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge impact on industrial policy?
(Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more mischievous mood).
> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today. bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign views without much reference to what they are or what impact they'll have.
[0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.
You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.
>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.
They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.
Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.
> They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth.
The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.
It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).
> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.
Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"
No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have
mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...
Interestingly, one of the things cults and totalitarian regimes have in common is a singular obsession with subverting the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.
One of the things all abusive and controlling parents have is a singular obsession with maintaining the primacy of the nuclear family and absolute parental authority.
Another thing they have in common is having children. A group of bad people having something in common doesn't tell us anything about the thing. Obviously the motivation in their case might be a bit suspect but nuclear families with strong parental authority are nonetheless a good model for families. I'd argue an extended family is probably a little bit better, but nuclear isn't bad.
Same goes for cults, calling something a cult doesn't automatically mean it is an organisation dedicated to destroying itself. Some cults are organised by people who ultimately want their community to be successful and hold extremely worthwhile values. Too much authoritarianism will be a disaster but nuclear families are a good compromise position where there is just a dash of authority in the small.
And many such parents are in cults similarly guarding them, it's not true at all what the grandparent post says that cults don't value the nuclear family. They often value it a lot more than the rest of society, and it's often a key part of their marketing.
I'm confused though, children getting information via unfiltered access to the internet is a subversion of "the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship", no?
that's just a kid, unsupervised
where are the parents in your scenario
anyways that's how I learned to fly, without the chains people like you want to throw on the rest of us
stay down there in the muck and grime
If a hundred kids throw themselves off the cliff and one learns to fly, it's not oppressive to the one who did learn to fly to prevent other kids from throwing themselves off that same cliff and probably end up like the 99 that didn't.
Now, of course, if 99 kids learned to fly, then the opposite conclusion should be drawn - so, as in all things, we need nuance and a good understanding of the situation, not first principles thinking and anecdotes.
The nuclear family is such a recent concept so I have a lot of trouble understanding this wacky point of view. The nuclear family is itself a destruction of the corporate family. How do weird manosphere types identify it as somehow being the core of society.
To be fair, it has been the dominant mode of familial organization in colonial powers for the past 100+ years. When economics are stable from generation to generation there would be far less tendency to split households - only in times of abundance or want would it make sense for each generational unit to live separately. Killing off natives and taking their land and resources tends to create an awful lot of abundance. The nuclear family thus symbolizes prosperity and the right-wing mythological ideal of past abundance that can be regained by returning to "traditional values".
The colonized often do - the colonizers are the ones splitting and creating new families as quickly as possible in order to occupy more resources and grab a larger slice of the opportunities afforded by empire.
Perhaps but when I look into examples of corporate families they are almost always in a colonial context. Like you might be more likely to fragment if opportunities exist, and franchise out. But you still get the same stories of a family farm or workshop being owned and operated by multiple generations until the young ones get a tertiary opportunity to take on something else.
The nuclear family is neither a natural nor ubiquitous relationship, though. Any other dynamic of social support - whether it be manipulative or freeing - may likely subvert it.
History, by my reading, seems more replete with examples of extended families, which include additional relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
eg:
Some sociologists and anthropologists consider the extended family structure to be the most common family structure in most cultures and at most times for humans, rather than the nuclear family.
A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family, atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence.
It is in contrast to a single-parent family, a larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents.
Other sources include: Families Across Cultures: A 30-Nation Psychological Study (2006) from Cambridge press by the same author cited in wikipedia (James Georgas) and others: John W. Berry, Fons J. R. van de Vijver, Cigdem Kagitcibasi, Ype H. Poortinga
Contemporary trends such as increased one-parent families, high divorce rates, second marriages and homosexual partnerships have all contributed to variations in the traditional family structure.
But to what degree has the function of the family changed and how have these changes affected family roles in cultures throughout the world? This book attempts to answer these questions through a psychological study of families in thirty nations, carefully selected to present a diverse cultural mix.
The study utilises both cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives to analyse variables including family networks, family roles, emotional bonds, personality traits, self-construal, and 'family portraits' in which the authors address common core themes of the family as they apply to their native countries.
From the introductory history of the study of the family to the concluding indigenous psychological analysis of the family, this book is a source for students and researchers in psychology, sociology and anthropology.
I can't access the first source for that Wikipedia quote, but the second is a defunct website created by a graduate student. The fact that they're using it in the introduction for an article about the nuclear family is a good reason why people should be skeptical about claims on Wikipedia and should look into the sources themselves, not treat Wikipedia as if it was a source.
Isn't the extended family just a superset of the nuclear (or atomic) family? Defining the boundaries at grand-parents, aunts and uncles (I'm guessing proximity-based living relatives is kind of where you're making the boundary). By that logic an extended family is a nuclear family (formally) as it contains the definition of nuclear families by default, the nuclear family is just the smallest self replicating unit we've got available by default. Sperm (differential change between gens), (egg - really mitochondria) consistent base stability (ground truth) across gens, and the ability to self replicate.
EDIT: If you're arguing mixture of experts works better, than sure, I got you, if your arguing that there's a more non-binary way to do the self replication, that's a harder road to hoe. At least if you want to do it for free, which has a better track record of working for most people.
There's no "logic" here, you're just not aware of the history of the term and the sociological history behind it.
The nuclear family was an oddity that developed in England concomitant to the Industrial Revolution in middle-class families for whom occupational relocation was common. It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.
> It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial arrangement in the United States because its normalization was conducive for developing larger pools of productive labor.
As opposed to pseudo-Confucius China where larger pools of productive labor naturally formed?
That doesn't take away anything from the fundamental point where it's the smallest self-replicating unit, logic on behalf of the participants has nothing to do with it because it works out the gate. Of course it isn't the best, it was developed during a time of struggle and turmoil a la the industrial revolution (for the rural poor), it won because it was the the most resilient model (small, mobile, reactive, etc) to hard times.
Edit: I said developed, if formed is a word that helps you understand that it's not conscious then here you go
This is like saying the diatomic vases include monoatomic gasses because there are single atoms in the diatomic gas molecules. The whole point of the nuclear family is that it is indivisible, but easily divisible from other parts of the family. This is very visible in decisions like "can we move away for work?". In a nuclear family, this decision rests almost entirely on whether both parents agree to it and can find work. In an extended family, the grandparents and aunts and uncles (especially the grand aunts and uncles) will have an important word in the decision as well.
The Corporate Family is what you are thinking of. A corporate family includes all immediate branches. Imagine a ranch with a Patriarch and 3 male kids and their wives. If your dad dies your uncles and aunts just pick up the slack. Its usual also for all branches to work the same or related trades.
Its really tertiary education and suburbia that undermined the corporate family, atomising it. The Atomic family is modern.
See my other comment in this thread about anthropologists dichotomizing societies based on nuclear vs extended families. In short, it’s orthogonal to the issue.
The issue is that across the movement of time and generations a "nuclear family" unit of parents and their offspring has all the stability and longevity of a pencil balanced on it's tip .. the clock is ticking on Hapsberg lips and the oddities of pharoahs.
Long lasting societies have a larger formal weave based on outworking and out breeding, formally moieties in the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere.
A single family unit alone is insufficient and historically cycles members in and out over half a generation through marriage and fortune seeking.
I've seen your other comments and they have that kind of first order depth expected of a simple thought and looking things up quickly on a phone.
Here's a very shallow introduction to a family of systems with many variations that lasted some 70 thousand years keeping bloodlines clean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiety_(kinship)
It is. I think you’re bringing a lot of baggage to the term. In common usage (verified on my phone dictionary), it simply means a couple and their dependent children. It doesn’t require that they live separately from extended family. It doesn’t require that all the children have the same biological parents. It doesn’t even require that the parents are different sexes. Or that the parents are married and live together. It’s just a more specific term to remove the “extended” sense of the more general “family.”
You're telling me that the nuclear family - two parents and their children living as a unit without drama - is more ubiquitous and stable than, say, the exchange of goods and services for money? Divorce rates and credit card would beg to differ.
The comment chain you replied to said it's a stable and ubiquitous arrangement. You're not trying to argue it's stable or even that it's an arrangement - you're just arguing it can be found within a larger structure. It's as if someone said cliques and anticliques aren't good designs for computer networks, and you said yes they are, because every network of a certain size contains a clique or an anticlique by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem - that may be true but it's incidental.
It's also as if someone is saying that Java isn't best at functional programming, and you pointed out that yes it is, because look at all the functions calling other functions.
I don't think it is. Cultures around the world had wildly different familial and child-bearing organisations, too much for the nuclear family to be considered a cultural universal.
Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Dictionaries contain the meanings of words and terms as commonly used. If you look up “nuclear family,” the meaning comports entirely with how I have been using the term. I’m sorry that’s inconvenient for your self conception.
Nuclear family has never had primacy - look at wild, dangerous places, primacy is held by extended family, clans, tribes or mafia.
‘Nuclear family primacy’ exists only In carefully crafted stable and safe societies, and another authority must exist to organise military-age men for matters of war and survival.
Thus nuclear family can only exist as we know it, in a partially undermined condition.
It’s absolutely not a fiction that the nuclear family is the most important human social arrangement. In every language I’m aware of, a child’s first word is ‘mother’ and in most languages ‘father’ follows shortly thereafter. Other social arrangements are important (we live in societies or tribes or clans, after all), but throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.
You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.
>throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.
Throughout most of history people grew up with their mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this corporate family through modern practices (Finance, Tertiary Education, Suburbia)
> You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.
I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.
Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.
It's the basic social unit part. In society that actually exists, they're not a basic unit. You can obviously find couples and their dependent children, just like maybe you can find a monad in a Java program, but they're not basic units.
If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance, you would not see “mother” and “father” universally conserved across all languages as the first words that people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish who don’t know what water is; nuclear families are so pervasively important that you just can’t see it.
This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.
I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.
>nuclear families are so pervasively important
Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.
Kids that don’t grow up with their parents do not learn them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their parents, often still learn something else as their first words.
Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.
"Nuclear" here is in reference to households with only mother, father, and children, in distinction to the norm of multigenerational households throughout history and in most of the world today excepting the West.
No, that’s baggage that people are bringing to the conversation. It merely means a couple and their dependent children. Whether or not they live separately from extended family has no bearing on the term.
> if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?
> if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
This goes to show that you, along with many other commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it’s so different from your experience.
Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.
They are not functionaries like police, they actually share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive and well.
It's very odd to me seeing nuclear family being propped up in an exclusive/or relationship with a strong extended family. Every strong extended family dynamic that I've seen is the result of a strong nuclear family from a generation before.
To be clear, I am not arguing that nuclear and extended families are exclusive of each other. I think most of the people arguing against me are confused about this. Anthropologists dichotomize societies by nuclear family vs extended family because Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all, whereas in many societies the extended family is an important social unit. And the difference usually has a lot of implications. Hence the dichotomy being useful. But this does not mean that in societies where extended families are important that they are more important than nuclear families. And really this shouldn’t be surprising: we’re not bees. We form reproductive pairs. Our children are twice as related to us as our nieces and nephews. There’s no way it could ever come to be that the nuclear family would not be the primary human social institution.
> Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all
Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended families in the past, and both have placed less of an emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so these changes were more noticeable in them.
