The Book of Hope(Jane G.):
“Have you heard the joke about the diference between an optimist and a pessimist?" I asked. “The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possi-ble worlds, and the pessimist fears the optimist is right.”
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Yes, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (GOODREADS) from 1986 is an awesome and groundbreaking book indeed, but she has written MANY more books (WIKIPEDIA) after that one, which shouldn’t be overlooked, IMHO.
Also, her work is, in total, a lot more than just about chimpanzees, it is about a new way of thinking about non-human animals, about the minds of non-human persons, and it is also about stopping our murdering of them. It is no surprise that she first went vegetarian in her young years, and turned vegan some time later.
Her work doesn’t just call for admiration but for consequences.
I wanted to mention just one other book here: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (GOODREADS), but @Giancarlo beat me to it (thanks!).
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And a variation… The pessimist believes things couldn’t possibly get any worse. The optimist believes they can.
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I’m sure that most of you have never heard of the K3 band (Karen, Kristel and Kathleen), but they were sort of the Flemish Spice Girls in the nillies, and so many Dutch speaking children back then were huge fans (K3 lyrics are more tame and wholesome than those of the Spice Girls, so they catered to a younger audience). I think even now, many children here know their songs and dance moves.
Yesterday the original K3 line-up gave a reunion concert in Antwerp, providing lots of youth sentiment for people who are in their 20s now.
A short video about the concert:
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A distant call from the 80’s.
I remember randomly seeing his video streams on YouTube!
Bad news:
This explains quite a few things, actually…
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Does OGF count as social media too? I certainly haven’t gotten any cleverer in the last 5 years …
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IIRC you’d not be considered a teen according to most common definitions.
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I’m not a teen too but we are not yet the only users of OGF
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It was meant as a joke.
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I’d bet the ogf and other social media make us all dumber, not discriminating on age
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Why would it make us dumber?
My rank has definitely gotten worse after i started participating in the forums 
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I got that.
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If a study says that people who often use social media are on average dumber, should we conclude that social media make us dumb or that dumb people use social media more often?
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Also depends on what dumb means.
If a person spends their time on social media and then is asked to do a crossword, and is worse than a person who spends their time doing crosswords instead of social media, that wouldn’t be that surprising.
But a lot of IQ related tests have a sort of arbitrary component to them, where if you studied that sort of thing you could do better somewhat artificially.
If your social media algorithm got skewed into showing you videos and posts about people solving IQ tests and random puzzles, because that’s the kinds of pages you follow, maybe you’d be even less “dumb” afterward.
I guess the idea though, is about whether you spend your time doing activities that require some critical thinking or problem solving or not. If you don’t do that, then you’re less likely to score well on it, the same way they make similar claims about people overusing GenAI.
@yebellz article specifically
Preteens using increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared with those who use no or little social media.
makes a lot of sense, because I feel like a lot of social media is not really designed to be memorable in any long term way. If you watched an hour of Instagram reels or TikTok, I think it’s pretty hard to recall any of it, though it might’ve been entertaining at the time.
Of course it’s also watching and listening as opposed to actively reading most of the time.
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Yes, and children may also read books in addition to using social media. So to make a fair comparison, both variables
- Time spent reading books
- Time spent using social media
should be taken into account.
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