You are making assumptions about what I am saying again. I am not advocating for more TikTok usage. At no point did I say anything positive about TikTok. What I am advocating for is people reaching a certain threshold of evidence before going around stating things as fact.

No, you did not get that right. I’m saying there is a small body of evidence that may or may not indicate some detrimental effects and that we should conduct further research before jumping to conclusions. The claim that TikTok is rotting people’s brains is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. A claim being unfounded doesn’t strictly mean it is untrue, but it does mean there isn’t any real reason to be making the claim in the first place.

But think of all the space that would take! If you replant forests where are we going to put our superhighways and parking lots?

The first one is one that I didn’t find in my own time. It correlates heavy usage of TikTok with a decreased ability to block one’s own distracting thoughts. Certainly interesting, and worth further study, but the authors appear to have equated that correlation with a causal effect. They did not satisfactorily delineate between someone who has a poor attention span and is attracted to TikTok because of it and someone with a poor attention span caused by TikTok.

The second and third studies I have already addressed in my other comments. The second study being the Chinese one that demonstrated a correlation between heavy TikTok usage and memory loss, anxiety, stress, depression, etc. Again, important findings, but crucially not causal. The third is the meta analysis that refused to make a statements regarding detrimental effects of TikTok usage.

The fourth isn’t a study, it’s an article. This article does link to several studies, however the only one the directly mentions TikTok is, again, that same study of roughly 3,000 Chinese students. The rest of the studies mentioned are targeting social media use in general.

Which neuroscientists are saying that? All the articles I’ve found referring to “TikTok Brain” quote one Dr. Patrick Porter. And I have become quite wary of trusting one man’s word, even that of a professional, since the whole vaccines cause autism thing.

You have linked a term paper, one study, and two articles. The study is a meta analysis that refuses to comment on the detrimental effects of TikTok usage due to a lack of research in the field in general. One article is about social media use in general and does not directly link to any scholarly works. The other does directly target TikTok and links to a study on Chinese students. There, TikTok Use Disorder was positively correlated with memory loss, anxiety, stress, and depression. Unfortunately my understanding of statistical analysis is not strong enough to judge the quality of the study, but to my limited knowledge it seems robust for its purposes. That being said, positive correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Notably, this study was a one time questionnaire. Meaning there isn’t any mechanism to determine the effects of high TikTok usage over time.

All this is to say that the field is deeply understudied, and that there aren’t any reliable conclusions that can be drawn yet. It may be that there are adverse effects, but that has yet to be proven.

Do you know how many times I’ve heard the “designed to exploit the dopamine pathways” line? You know how much proof I’ve seen for that? Zilch, nada, nothing. Not a single source is ever provided to back that claim. Does that automatically mean it’s a false claim? No, but it’s definitely suspicious. From my limited time looking into it for myself all I can see is that TikTok does, in fact, produce a dopamine response. That’s it. None of the (very few, this is an under-researched subject) studies I have found even differentiate it from other sources of dopamine. Hell, one of the articles I saw used the amount of time a fucking hashtag stays on the trending list as an indicator of the degradation of attention spans. I trust I don’t have to explain how those two are only superficially linked.

I know it’s a long article guys, but it worth your time. This summary is a mess and completely removes crucial details, including all the quotes the summary alludes to. If you’ve got 30 minutes and are genuinely interested give it a read or a listen.

For sure, I’m not saying we have to entirely ban cars. And small cars are much better than large cars. But neither should be everyone’s first thought for “how do I get around town?”

That is barely even the start of what we need. It would do us better to embrace public transit and densification. If we all just switched to small cars instead it wouldn’t solve the underlying issues with car dependent infrastructure. We’d still have wide swaths of useful land buried under miles of concrete and asphalt. We’d still have urban spaces that are hostile to anyone not in a automobile (admittedly somewhat less so). My commute time is nearly doubled simply because all of the parking lots I have to walk through. There’s no need (outside of accommodating drivers) for everything to be separated by so much empty space.

Looks like a centralized alternative to a bank card. Rather than using an existing network like Visa or MasterCard as the backbone it appears that their intent is to build their own separate system. The project is still in the planning phase though, so what it eventually looks like (if it ever happens) is anyones guess.