I created DecayBlock, mainly to help people stay focussed online but also to teach myself JavaScript.

I've been using it for the past few months and it's massively boosted my productivity.

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/decayblock/lpljcnal... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/decayblock/

Slightly tangential, but we recently published an algorithm aimed at addressing the paperclip maximizer problem: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07462

Curious what others think about this direction, particularly in terms of practicality

Yes, this is flawed legislation, and yes kids will find ways to bypass these protections.

But I think this is a step in the right direction. There is clear evidence of the harms caused by social media, especially for adolescents. We have to start trying things - albeit imperfectly - to get to a better place. We can learn a lot from the outcomes of this experiment.

The key feedback that was unaniamous from all the experts that managed to reply to the Government's 24-hour consultation period was that they all agreed a blanket ban is the worst way to approach the platform (they were all ignored by all but a few Senators).

An interesting part of the ban is that kids will be banned from Instagram, but sites like 4chan (and ovbiously anything on the dark web, which teens might now be more motivated to access) will be out of the reach of it...

Nice of you to volunteer others as experimental subjects.

World is divided by people who grew up with social media and people who didn't. I'd imagine there's already ample longitudinal metrics to extrapolate differences and draw conclusions between the two groups. The experiment's not really whether social media is bad for adolescents, but whether one can successfully legislate to reduce social media use among them. Not holding my breath.

We have taken such steps in many areas now, and it simply does not work. We can keep trying this old, tired method, but it does not work. I do not want ID verification for the Internet either, to be honest.

> kids will find ways to bypass these protections.

But this is a change in law. Yes kids will easily be able to access social media if they want to, but it will be illegal and punishable.

The fact that kids are going to circumvent the rules means that it's going to be a wild back and forth between companies and the courts when they do.

could you share the clear causal evidence?

This is a critical space for progressing AI in science right now. Once we have algorithms that can process charts and interpret data, our ability to integrate scientific information from multiple studies will increase exponentially. We may even find new interpretations from charted data that human eyes are unable to interpret. Until then, it's as if we're stuck with blind AI agents who have to take text for granted without validating it against graphical data.

We published a preprint last year with an algorithm for content restriction that YouTube might find useful: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3708350/v1

Essentially it's a dynamic regulator that restricts content based on one's recent viewing history. So the more somebody watches harmful content, the less it gets recommended to them. And it can be applied to any type of harmful content.

It's designed to oppose the positive feedback loops that lead to addiction.

What is harmful content?