Emotional Climate Change—an inconvenient idea
Hello,
this is the beta version of my coming website’s homepage.
It’s a summary of my concept of an Emotional Climate Change.
Happy to hear your comments.
Marcus.
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Emotional Climate Change ?
Depression, isolation or stress are more than just side effects of modern civilization. They bare self-reinforcing potential.
We believe our social and emotional environment is systematically, increasingly and predictably damaged.
We think it’s time to acknowledge this development that shows striking parallels to global warming and give it a name:
Emotional Climate Change (ECC)
This website is dedicated to show that...
… there is a long term, negative trend of our mental well-being.
… digital technology contributes to and dramatically accelerates this trend
.… emotional degeneration eventually may cause effects of global scale.
Key Findings
Time Compression is a main driver of higher stress levels, supporting impulsive, aggressive and overall irrational behavior. At the same time, less and less de-stressing activities (sports, social interaction, sex...) are performed.
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains...”
(Sean Parker, Facebook founding president, Axios.com, Nov. 9th 2017)
Dear Sean, not sure about God, but HERE is what Facebook is doing:
Digital communication and social media are not only spoiling our social skills and supporting empathy loss.
They especially weaken our ability to achieve and maintain self esteem. The dopamine that really should reward our kids for healthy social behavior (forming deeper relationships, cooperating for mutual benefit, dealing with conflicts...) is now sadly only conditioning them to spend more time sharing and liking. But only one’s own achievement can support self esteem, which is the core source of happiness and satisfaction.
Low self-esteem (LSE) in contrary can bring out the worst in humans: Humiliating, discrediting or dominating others are unconcious attempts to compensate own deficits. This way, LSE is probably the biggest reason for bullying, tyranny and evil in general.
Facebook is spoiling minds on a global scale.
We call that mental terraforming.
Additional but secondary drivers are urbanization, paleo clashing, cultural and mental impoverishment and even prosperity (thru various mechanisms).
The Emotional Climate tilts when the deficits acquired by digital generations are passed on to their kids directly—i.e. without them even having to be exposed to digital challenges. As most of one’s self esteem is acquired during childhood, the direct LSE effects of social media on it’s users are rather small. Socially spoiled parenting will have much more impact. We get a taste of this with the so called Millennials already now:
“Millenials… are tough to manage… accused of being entitled and narcissistic,… unfocused and lazy...”
(Simon Sinek, “Millennials in the Workplace” Interview, Dec. 2016)
Best case, things will get worse only gradually, like they did for the last few decades: An even more ‘strictly business’ life, more stress, less fulfillment, less happiness.
What really scares the sh*t out of us are the dynamics of increased aggressive potentials, empathy loss and lower self esteem, as any of these is likely to breed all kinds of toxic behavior, let alone their combination. The infamous example of such combination is the situation in Germany before World War II—and we can’t help noticing similar tendencies right now.
This is why we see an urgent need for change, namely
standards for emotional safety in technology
emotional and social guidance and education for everyone
establishing empathy, emotions and rationality as value in society
OK, this was the briefest summary of our concepts. Feel free to learn more in detail, especially about the emotional mechanisms at work that we think everybody should be aware of.
When I read a phrase like key fiendings I would expect on LW an argument that’s backed up by research. Without any reference to published research and facts established by published research, the argument you are making feels ill-supported.
In addition you are using a lot of bold-text which is a stylistic choice that often done key sales pages.
Together the resulting text feels like it’s not up to the standards of LW discourse.
This was nothing but an abstract on my concept.
Also, it is not some scientific paper, which I thought i clearly expressed.
You anticipating this appears to me like some fallacy—which I would not expect here.
I didn’t wrote anything about anticipation. I wrote about expectations. There’s a subtle difference between the two.
Expectations aren’t simply predictions. Expectations are about norms. Content like that which is below the norms of what’s expected on LessWrong gets downvoted, so that it doesn’t show up anymore.
Just to provide a bit of feedback, this seems unnecessarily alarmist.
“Social media is bad” is a fairly standard trope and not something which will surprise many people. As a result, most people I know are aware of the problem and talk about how to use social media responsibly. In my experience young people are often most aware of this as they’ve been warned about the dangers for their entire lives. As a result they are often good at managing their social media use.
It’s not perfect but it’s not cataclysmic.
Could someone pls explain why this received 12 downvotes?
Not thought out enough. Pessimistic and alarmist, incomplete. No solutions proposed.
These are your opinions on the climate. Other people believe other things.
Where did it come from to perceive all negative? And how would you feel if that were the case?
Good question though. Why do you think it got −12?
we are at −14 now and counting...
Has there ever been a threat voted down even more?
The key issue to this i guess is the LW community’s behaviour (sic!).
The audience is judging upon their anticipation rather than upon the bare things I wrote.
This is reason enough for me to pu my thoughts into a new threat rather than just
addressing it in a comment of a comment...
It’s not our job to imagine the best out of your idea. That’s your job. Even the best ideas can fail if they don’t have the transmission right.
I wonder if you can change your communication methods to make the concept more appealing?