> And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.

> the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd

It's pretty clear that I'm not defending engaging in baseless negative speculation, but refuting the dismissal of negative speculation based purely on the trope that "people have always predicted it".

Someone who read what they were responding to would rather easily have seen that.

> As you say, someone predicting doom has no bearing on whether it happens

That is not what I said. I'm pretty sure now that you did not read my comment before responding. That's bad.

This is what I said:

> It's then quite obvious that the fact that someone, somewhere, predicts a bad thing happening has ~zero bearing on whether it actually happens, and so the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd.

I'm very clearly pointing out (with "someone, somewhere") that a random person predicting a bad thing has almost no ("~zero") impact on the future. Obviously, if someone who has the ability to affect the future (e.g. a big company executive, or a state leader (past or present)) makes a prediction, they have much more power to actually affect the future.

> so why engage in it? It's just spreading FUD and dwelling on doom.

Because (rational) discussion now has the capacity to drive change.

> There's no expected value to the individual or to others.

Trivially false - else most social movements would be utterly irrelevant, because they work through the same mechanism - talking about things that should be changed as a way of driving that change.

It's also pretty obvious that there's a huge difference between "predicting doom with nothing behind it" and "describing actual bad things that are happening that have a lot of evidence behind them" - which is what is actually happening here, so all of your arguments about the former point would be irrelevant (if they were valid, which they aren't) because that's not even the topic of discussion.

I suggest reading what you're responding to before responding.

> Personally, I don't think "TikTok will shorten people's attention spans" qualifies as doom in and of itself.

You're bringing up "doom" as a way to pedantically quarrel about word definitions. It's trivial to see that that's completely irrelevant to my argument - and worth noting that you're then conceding the point about people correctly predicting that TikTok will shorten people's attention spans, hence validating the need to have discussions about it.