Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I'm assuming you actually believe the sentiment behind this — Why? Where did you first hear it, or from whom? What's your experience with Youtube search/recommendations, and how would you change it?

I've seen the stuff my niece and nephew gravitate to on Youtube. It's worse than an "ow my balls" parody. I had to sit down with my nephew and show him a slower longer video and the cool stuff in it; he got totally engrossed, but nobody had done that before.

Kids aren't designed by default to process complexity without a little help, while Youtube's algorithms are designed to allow professionals to exploit them at 80 second intervals with almost no interaction. It's the kind of thing Ray Bradbury would start a riot if he saw.

What on earth are you talking about? Kids are designed to digest immense complexity.

Adults and kids are both fairly stupid in front of a system that is designed to exploit the stimulus seeking behaviour that served us so well over our evolutionary history

This is another really, really bad meme. It's an excuse for people to never confront the reasons they enjoy or desire low status or low social value activities, offered at the cost of calling themselves, their friends and their children stupid.

Are you just objecting to the word "stupid"? It's not controversial to say we aren't well adapted to intelligently engineered environments built on value systems that differ from our own (and I mean the basic stuff here like getting food, looking after young, etc.), is it?

Why do you believe that? Is there some external reference for "intelligent" use of tools? "Stupid" is a poor descriptor for the thing you're pointing at, but my objection is to the implication that human beings fully lack agency, whether they're seeking food or trolling twitter.