logoalt Hacker News

delis-thumbs-7e01/16/20261 replyview on HN

From wikipedia: ” An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί epi "upon or above" and δῆμος demos "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time.”

As with covid, individual actions are not enough to stop the spread of the epidemic. You need vaccinations, health education, public policy etc. not just individual actions, so ”go dancing” and ”talk to people” doesn’t quite cut it.

Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…

I cannot either, but I think we need to start looking at technology from a point of view of public health. Some sort of sociology/medical studies on the effects of computing on human body/mind and society.


Replies

elric01/16/2026

> Seems strange to me that at this site from the whole internet people don’t seem to see the connection between the raise of new technologies and lonelines (with a host of other mental health/social issues). And therefore this is the one problem the nerds don’t seem to be able to solve…

It doesn't seem that strange that a website with a few thousand geeks isn't able to solve a global phenomenon by commenting on an article.

HN is a place for discussion. It seems unreasonable to expect world changing outcomes.

I suspect the "think global, act local"-motto applies here. You can certainly make a local impact by "going dancing".

show 1 reply