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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27917 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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...the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

The second flaw is that many adults are also led astray by extreme content boosted by social media algorithms; many of the adherents of Queue A Knon were already adults when social media became a thing.

I believe a better method would be to adjust the incentives further upstream, by requiring social media companies to implement an Agatean Wall¹ between user-experience and revenue-generation.

¹GNU Terry Pratchett.

Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.

It seems to me that this is a question of marginal tradeoffs. I'm in favor of giving the state the ability to stop child abuse, defined as what the consensus of people consider child abuse, but I'm unwilling to go much further than that. I disagree a lot with how many people raise their kids, but I accept the need to let them raise their kids as they wish since I don't want them getting a vote on how I raise my kid. I'd be willing to support the state having more power if there was more of a consensus of values where I live, but since there isn't I default to general libertarianism as the local maxima.

It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.

Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.

I default to general libertarianism as the local maxim[um].

That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.

The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).

Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.

I'm quote fond of checks and balances myself. The relative weight of each authority depends on the situation on the ground, though. In general, I think parents should be given a lot of deference since the state, even well run ones, tend to protects kids worse than their parents. The sky high rates of abuse in the foster care system is an example.

That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.

I think the issue with no one having authority over children is that they are not capable of acting in their interests and effectively advocating for themselves. You can debate the age of majority and how much authority teenagers should have, but the central case of a small child needs someone to protect them and advocate for them. I think rather than parents being the owner of their children, a better metaphor is that the children are trustees an the parents are trustors. Due to the track record of the state being a bad trustor, I defer to the parents decisions in most, but not all, cases.

The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).

While I personally think that having a child be exposed to a lot of perspectives, with an ideally worldly and fair parent giving their own commentary on them, I think the state is too blunt an instrument to effectively administer this type of complex acculturation. My view is that if they are unable/unwilling to protect children in their custody from abuse, they have not demonstrated the competency to administer this type of acculturation.

Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?

It’s irrelevant, my outgroup doesn’t breed well. Like pandas.

In other words, your main worry would be your outgroup converting outsiders to their worldview, which happens through the internet?

As to your second point, I do kind of like the idea of just banning social media completely. The issue with that is I can't think of a way to do that without obvious workarounds, while also not banning the entire internet. At least with children, age serves as a clear dividing line, and adults are generally better equipped to handle the internet than kids.

I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.

I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.

In my proposed architecture, one side of the wall would handle content-curation algorithms and interface design, with the instruction to make it convenient for the end user to see the content they want to see, with any advertisements or sponsored content kept to designated spaces clearly labeled as such. The other side of the wall would deal with anyone seeking to purchase advertising space or aggregate data, but would have no method to adjust the experience of end-users to keep them on the site longer; advertisers could either accept however many eyeball-minutes occur without engagement-maximisation tactics, or leave the attention of social-media users to their competitors.

This gives at least some possibility of squaring the circle of having a service both free-at-the-point-of-use and prioritising the preferences of its end-users.

As for how to bring about such a state of affairs, I have discovered a truly marvelous regulatory structure accomplishing this, which this comment box is too narrow to contain.

I'm still fighting the lonely battle to have it renamed the Fermat-Wiles theorem. Fermat's marginal proof never existed, for crissake.

Fermat's marginal proof never existed, for crissake.

Then he's entitled to the name for such legendary trolling.

Your link goes to a wikipedia page about a mathemathical theorem. Is that on purpose?

Link fixed; it should point to the relevant section of the article.

Pierre Fermat, circa 1637, wrote in the margin of a book "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." The theorem was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.

Congratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000!

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