Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness | Hacker News Reader

Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

377 pointsYuukiRey536 comments

I think it's the total visibility that's causing mental illness. There is no space where you can be with your friends, screw up, and not have it become known to everyone in your peer group. There's little space to make mistakes. No space to be yourself. You are under the watchful gaze of your friends, i.e. peer surveillance, nearly all of the time. Which induces stifling conformity.

Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up exerting social control over your life through social media.

So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.

On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those mistakes.

If this is the case, is this reflected in the suicide rate of small, nosy towns? Small towns are notorious for everyone knowing everyone else’s business.

There’s a difference, though, between everyone having access to what you have done, and people in your circle of trust gossiping about you to people outside of it. First, you can theoretically figure out the gossip and exclude them. Second, the gossip gossips about things _they_ find interesting, not about things random bored trolls find juicy. Thus, the odds of your faux pas exposing you to abuse are naturally lower.

In other words, “small towns have no secrets” is an oversimplification.

Suicide rates do go up the lower the population density. I can't say it's attributable to this dynamic, though.

> suicide rates increase as population density decreases and an area becomes more rural.

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.htm...

Entrapment, and a sense that there is no path to a bright future. Both socially and economically.

It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your "friends" here are in effect not allowing you to be yourself. And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you) if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.

You can always just delete your account. Granted, that's easier for me to say as an adult than it would be for your average peer-pressured teenager. But that's where parents can help.

I think eventually, teens will see social media as "uncool" in the same way as they see smoking cigarettes as "uncool" (in some countries). It takes a lot of social propagandizing to popularize that idea, but we did it with cigarettes and we can do it with social media.

We need to make being off the grid cooler than being on it. Privacy is cool!

I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually. It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away, as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than the benefits.

However not being on social media can have real-world consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.

There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the children that way and also make it more difficult for adult authority figures to interfere with their lives.

My 6yo daughter had to create a login for various online things recently (e.g., code.org to keep track of her progress). I don't exactly when or where they taught her this at school, but she absolutely refused to share any of her personal information in any way. She spent a good 30 minutes trying to make up a handle to use that she liked but didn't include any reference to her name, her initials, anything about her birth month or day (I'd suggesting adding the day of the month she was born as a suffix so she'd remember it given all her initial name preferences seems to be taken already), etc.

I was very impressed that they seem to have this conditioned into them so young, and to a level of importance that exceeded even my own paranoia about doing it properly.

One of Haidt's points is that you can't escape by deleting your account, because everyone else is still online. Suppose you're a teenage girl. The gossip mill about you is still going to be doing the rounds on social media, so the cyberbulling can't be stopped whether or not you're participating. If anything, being the strange outcast by refusing to go online will inflame things. That's one reason why a ban for those below 16 or 18 is a good idea.

You say that but it's a bit tough to care if you don't see it happen. It's possible for everyone here to be the subject of a meme somewhere of a picture taken without consent. However, it just feels tough to care unless you actually see the meme and the reactions of people to it.

The difference between some completely random person taking a picture and your circle of friends is that it's very unlikely for the former to reach anyone you know, where as with the latter it's a guarantee.

But then it would be brought to their attention? And they can respond?

If it's never brought to their attention, it's pointless to worry about.

Obviously doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.

So?

It might be simply putting a book quote as a response came across as passive aggressive.

The reference is to the Virgin Suicides. The doctor can’t believe that Cecilia would slash her wrists because he can’t comprehend that she would have experienced real or perceived distress at her age. To which she responds with the quote above.

I’m suggesting that it’s very easy to be dismissive of teenage problems as trivial or easily solved when we’ve already long recovered from that particular malady.

> I’m suggesting that it’s very easy to be dismissive of teenage problems as trivial or easily solved when we’ve already long recovered from that particular malady.

Okay that sounds reasonable, but how does that relate to my prior comment?

How does "responding" help to protect against gang bullying?

I don't think this is unique to social media. Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized. It would be even worse because there's no way to find people who might be different like you, unlike today where there are forums and other websites.

> Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized

I think that's a part of OP's point. After that, if you wanted, you could go away to college and buy normal clothes and reinvent yourself completely.

Nowadays, if you're a person who agrees for whatever reason is a shitheel, you're that same shitheel forever, and the inertia required to overcome that is greater.

You're right in the sense that the internet also allows to find sympathetic others, but that doesn't shake the stigma, merely exposes it to more people. (Which has the added benefit of contributing to polarization.)

Why do you think that? Most people don't have the energy to keep track of people they disagreed with once in the past.

If I ask 100 people who Gary Johnson is, most of them will remember him as "The Aleppo guy." If I type "Gary Johnson" into Google (even incognito), the first auto-complete is "Gary Johnson Aleppo." Nevermind that he's an accomplished politician, mountain climber, author, etc., he's broadly defined by his one big public gaffe.

Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.

If you remember Lindy Chamberlain at all, it's probably as the "Dingos ate my baby" lady, whose name was dragged through the mud and went to prison for years before it was revealed likely that dingos had almost certainly eaten her baby.

Chris Jeffries was questioned in the murder of Joanna Yates.

Richard Jewell. Fatty Arbuckle. Bruce Ismay. Rebecca Black. Kevin Carter. Monica Lewinsky. The McDonald's Coffee Lady (Stella Liebeck). If you remember any of these names, it's almost certainly for something bad they were accused of doing.

I've seen studies that show that because our brains are our foremost self-defense mechanisms, they're constantly looking for bad patterns to avoid, so we remember the bad things about people much more readily than we remember the good. That we do so for faraway people with whom we'll never likely have any contact is likely low on the utility scale, but we mostly haven't adapted to avoiding it.

Actors who manage to land parts doing crime scene reenactments for true crime docudramas tend to regret them, because people at the grocery see the actors and forget they were watching television and assume he's a serial murderer.

We rely on our intuitions so much when meeting new people, and our brains hold onto negative impressions so strongly that even though you think you don't have the energy to keep track of it, the brain actually does. Perhaps not just over a disagreement, but if you form a negative connotation around a picture of someone internet infamous, cognitive bias ensures that you'll likely dislike them if you ever actually meet and they'll have to actively work to overcome that negative preconception despite us having formed that preconception based on perhaps as little as 10 seconds of their life portrayed out of context.

If you do not dislike anyone that you haven't met (e.g., a politician, or polarizing celebrity like Logan Paul or Joe Rogan or Elon Musk) then congrats, you're in the (presumably) low percentage of people who don't have this affliction. But I think it's a pretty big stretch to say that "most" don't.

> Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.

Amazing to think that Donald Trump could make gaff after gaff and still, inexplicably, be considered electable. Dean made one dumbass howl and got shit-canned. MSM in action.

Also, a shame about Fatty Arbuckle, dude even got an apology from the court but still got his career ruined.

Wouldn't you just be pushed into dressing the same way? Is it really problematic?

Getting into fights over it wasn't the greatest experience, does that count as problematic?

I think being able to find others like you is actually what really sends mental health spiraling.

Back in the day, if you were a pathetic loser, that’s all you were, and that’s how you had to navigate life. This would force you to take an honest look at yourself and see why you don’t fit in to larger society and maybe if you should try to be different. And eventually you might become a version of yourself a bit more acceptable to society. Even if you knew deep down you were a pathetic loser, at least now you knew how to cooperate and be agreeable with others and even make friends that are different from you and not total losers. In time you would gain wisdom about life and be content with yourself.

But now? It’s quick to find so many others exactly like you, and you can feed off each others thoughts and words of encouragement, no matter how twisted. Eventually you see everyone not like you as an enemy, rather than as a person whose friendship and acceptance you seek to earn. You lose your connection to the rest of society, you find yourself increasingly unable to relate, and find yourself spending your days seething with hate at the society that you feel has nothing to offer you, filled with people you’ll never give a fuck about.

I'd say that's not necessarily bad, more of a double edged sword. Many marginalized groups do need these kinds of support. They fall into the categories like 'I like playing games instead of sports, so what', 'I like watching niche foreign shows with subtitles'. At the end of the day, many ppl do benefit from increased connections. Many groups(both negative and positive) wont even exist with current technology.

Personally, it's a net positive for me.

That only explains the poor mental health of terrible people with shitty beliefs though. What about people with parents who managed to socialize them well but yet are horribly depressed due to the environment being in shambles? The environment has always been mistreated by those who make more money from that mistreatment, from way before the Internet was a smidge of an idea.

I think in most cases this isn't true (who cares how niche your hobbies or style are), but when it comes to internet mental health discussion communities there definitely is a double edged sword IMO. Depends on the community and person, but I suspect you're right in the case of e.g. finding others who are depressed, there's a lot of overshoot in the reaction to stigma in some of these groups, to the point it encourages giving into some pretty bad lifestyle loops.

> Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s

Social media is small town gossip, at scale.

>I don't think this is unique to social media.

Not just that, it's one of the biggest themes in modern American fiction before social media. Most of PK Dick's work deals with the opressiveness of middle class culture, mental illness, people who don't fit in and how these things overlap. You had Fight Club or Taxi Driver on violence and isolation particular of men, or American Beauty on the conformist and almost totalitarian nature of the suburbs, etc. It's been a major topic in American culture for decades.

This is true, but there were those of us who embraced being the ostracized. Being the 'weird' one (worse words used) made me who I am today.

I think it's the addicive nature of social media is causing mental illness. Lack of sleep, lack of time to just let the mind wander (=lack of time to actually lift your gaze from the small and take care of your bigger things in life).

It can of course be a mixture of several effects.

> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah.

We seem to have different friends. Maybe it's a generational thing? Very few of my friends are highly active on social media. At least, not as far as I can tell, because I rarely check the feeds.

I left facebook a long time ago because it just felt like low value interaction. None of my friends on there were people I actually spent time with, and the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people. I never specifically experienced the peer surveillance you describe, but I believe it's real or that social media has made people believe it's real (to a degree worthy of concern)

I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.

> the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people

I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people have learned? or just deserted it?

Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.

Twitter is first with the news and political hot takes. Those and memes boil down to Facebook posts and reshares.

It’s pretty similar to what was the 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. But politics became more polarizing and every government official was giving their hot take. Instant short replies. I guess all those seconds of engagement add up.

Twitter is easy to sign up for, doesn't really require any sort of actual human details, and runs entirely on essentially short text blurbs that are easy to automate, scan, parse, and track.

Retweets, ratios, and bog-standard sentiment analysis also give immediate feedback as to success of a tweet. Real easy to tweak a bot to produce content, or to game the system -- and that's before GPT-4.

Facebook at least requires you to pretend you're a real person with a real face and real friends.

> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.

I think this is truthy, but I abandoned social media a long time ago and my experience is different. At first, I lost touch with a lot of people and my world became small. After some time people found me (I still run a blog, so I'm discoverable) and now folks will call and visit with me. I get a lot more authentic conversations with folks because they know I'm not going to put them on blast. I still have my judgements and my opinions like anyone, but those, I think, are easier for people to deal with.

Maybe the real equation is that if the shallow, judgemental connection is made available, people will reach for it because it's easy, and palatable, like junk food. But sooner or later they need a real meal and wouldn't you rather be that occasional quality interaction rather than the quantity interaction?

>no space to be yourself

not only there are multiple spaces to be yourself within, you can be yourself in different ways and under different identities. there's "side profiles", "finstas", etc., there's more flexibility and more ways to express yourself, across all different sides of you. like, if someone thinks that people just use one identity and hang out around a certain circle of people in a certain space (or set of spaces), that just doesn't align with reality. people make side pages, pseudonyms and identities, with those having different circles of people they interact with, and different audiences, within one space/platform or across multiple different ones. just like, a handful of apps, insta, twitter, tiktok, discord, all may have different circles and dynamics. and it's fine - and it works - because irl spaces/circles/identities, do play out in a similar way. (like, differences between home/friends/school/work/public/etc.)

As a parent. It's a hard topic. And not black and white.

For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part of the puzzle.

Consider a few things:

1. The percentage of households with kids has gradually declined over time, while the percentage of retirees has gone up. So you just generally have an older population. Not everyone lives in a neighborhood where kids can roam and likely some other, known, parent will keep an eye on them.

2. Tolerance for children (esp teenagers) IMO has declined. Understandably, they... can be obnoxious :). There used to be more IRL activities for teens. I've seen, however, even movie theaters don't want ANY minors there without a parent. There's not a shopping mall to drop them off at. And the pandemic has REALLY hurt this.

3. The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever good college / do well in life, they need to have their time spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.

Combining these, society, for a myriad of reasons, doesn't have a lot of opportunities for teenagers to truly be independent. And that too has been cited as a cause of mental health issues (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309101330.h...).

It's a doom spiral too, the fewer kids that are free roaming, the less likely your own kid, when kicked out of the house, will find friends to play with. The less likely other parents will be conducive to your kid knocking on their door, etc etc.

So without kids roaming the streets, how do they connect with their friends? They use some kind of screen / video games / social media / etc. And depriving them of this can mean limiting an outlet of some degree of independence.

Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes.

Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social / independence outlet?

I wonder if some of the lack of teenager tolerance has to do with larger congregations of teens due to social media. When I was young with no cell phone it was a non-trivial exercise to get a few friends to coordinate to meet and go to a movie.

Now you can start with 4 or 5 people, and if their friends and friends of friends start to get looped in then you have a larger group. Now instead of 0 or 1 obnoxious kids in a group, you may have 3-4 obnoxious ones and a much larger group.

Before cell phones, we didn't worry about making group plans. Everyone just went to the movies or the mall or the Taco Bell parking lot and everyone else went to.

This is the inevitable conclusions of stranger danger and car-based suburbanization.

When people only access the world via car and avoid walking around, they never build familiarity with their own neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for, are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.

Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income households, the only location where children were safe and tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds dystopian even as I type it out.

Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for this travesty to take place.

People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter to the built infrastructure.

___

I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get to know your neighbors.

The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in leaving their younger children under their supervision, in return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent their time.

North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.

This doesn't explain why teenage girls are suffering from increased mental health issues not only in the USA, but also in other Anglosphere countries, Nordic countries... (etc. ?)

Suburbs and cars already existed 60 years ago, and that was before cell phones for coordinating meetups.

Well 60 years ago was the 60s and suburbanization only started taking off in the 50s. I don't think OP is claiming suburbanization had this effect instantly.

What city?

Excuse me we came here to use data to dog on social media not solve actual problems.

It sounds like you have a very healthy relationship with your son!

I think not enough people here are understanding the distinction between a communication tool (eg. discord), doom-scrolling platform like tiktok, and video games.

A discord server can be very beneficial for your kids and allow them to coordinate activities. A lot of cool experiences I had in high school and friendships were a direct result of MSN Messenger. A shared multiplayer server like minecraft is also a great way to make friends and learn some social skills. I don't think it's as good as a physical sport activity, but it's far better than a lot solo hobbies traditionally considered "good" for them.

The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, especially going into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities.

If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's going to obscure the social media influence on mental health outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate the two.

>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect.

I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.

In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).

I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best.

The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.

Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.

Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.

That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.

Video games are a sore subject in my house... I grew up with them and I turned out arguably okay (healthy, employable, sociable, etc). But my wife thinks they are the bane of society. And it wasn't until recently that I realized how much the "endgame" of video games has shifted since my childhood in the 90s. Back then, it seemed like the majority of games had an actual end, or they continued to get progressively painfully harder, or both. The number of mainstream games that went on 'forever' (and encouraged you to keep playing) seemed much lower. Now it seems like it's quite the opposite, and of course its the addicting, never-ending, always-online games that our kids and their friends want to play.

For now I'm mostly letting my kids play on one of those mini Super Nintendos with a bunch of built-in games, which they always eventually get tired of and decide on their own to go do something else. When it's Minecraft... I basically have to peel it out of their hands.

yes, things have definitely changed for video games in the past few years.

Loot boxes and the concept of being peer-pressured into paying money for trendy skins is not something that existed when I grew up. TBH, I think many concepts that are popular in AAA games today should require robust 18+ (or even 21+) ID verification to be allowed to use them. I generally never like the idea to banning things for everyone, but we can at least make it a bit harder for kids to access them.

Minecraft is one of the extremely few addictive games I wouldn't be too worried about if I was raising kids but I would verify what type of server/maps they are using. They get to build things and interacts with other people and last time I checked they had relatively few dark patterns (no gambling, loot boxes, paying for trendy skins, pay-to-win, etc.). I hope it is still the same today.

I have a collection of MS DOS games that my kids sometimes play too, precisely because they are the games with a single player mode and an actual end.

Strongly agree, but the challenge is that it is not a hard and fast distinction within a single product/app. Take Snapchat for example (popular with the under 18 crowd). It is both a messaging tool to communicate with friends (great) and it also has a ton of other doom scroll/UGC feed services. I'm not sure what the break down in time and profits for the two services are, but I suspect that they make good money from the doom scroll stuff so it is hard for their executive leadership to be ethical on this issue. I would personally be very supportive if the Government would take measures to protect people under 18 from feeds without restricting access to messaging. Such a law will require a bit of subtlety in how it works.

Yep. Even for video games in my teens I created and led a clan. It was very social and constructive for me.

Great points. I was just in Spain (Madrid) and noticed teenagers playing in parks and even on swings etc along with small children. I never see that in American parks, never. I don't know the mental happiness of teenagers in Spain/Madrid in general but my wife and I thought it was interesting.

Reading the posts here I can say this seems to be an American problem. Kids here in Europe are still way more fucked up then in the 90s but still the states seem like a shithole of loneliness for kids.

Not to contradict your point (which I agree with!), but I as someone who was recently an American teenager I think you might be happy to know that me and my friends used to quite enjoy going to the park and playing on the swingsets! Though we were certainly the exception, not the rule.

Good to hear. I would love to see more of it.

> Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes. Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social / independence outlet?

Haidt says male use of social media in the form of gaming is categorically different to Instagram/Snapchat/Tiktok-type social media use. Because that social activity is less about performing for the camera and bullying and social comparisons, so he doesn't see it to be a problem in need of a ban.

> The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever good college / do well in life, they need to have their time spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.

This is the big one, in conjunction with other comments about how there's "no tolerance for failure" anymore. You have to be on track to be a top tier performer by the time you're 10 or else you will never make it back up (or at least that's how a lot of people feel). Plus there's a sense that either you make it to the top, or you might as well be at the bottom, because the middle class is rapidly vanishing.

The pressure is higher, and starts younger, than ever before.

As already pointed out on the other blog posts, pressure to "get into whatever good college" can't be the explanation when it is only affecting a statistically insignificant minority : even in the USA, roughly half of people don't go to college, and roughly the other half is getting accepted into one that is not hard to get into.

A lot of this rings true but is this a theory that explains a sharp bend in 2012?

There is no sharp bend in 2012. I can easily interpret it as an gradual increase more from 2010 or so. Eyeballing charts is not science.

Call it whatever you like, it still has to be explained for a potential cause to be viable.

Not necessarily. It depends on whether this increase is just natural long term variance. The charts Haidt shows are very truncated. Data about suicides exists for far longer than the lines he shows.

> For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part of the puzzle.

Blood hell. Kids will be like zoo exhibits of the last of their species. Seems in everyone's benefit that they are well-socialized, street smart, well-educated, AND not make virtually the same mistakes everyone else are making. We can rapidly go from the myth of "overpopulation" to population crash in as short as a generation.

> my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server.

Maybe a little off-topic, but I think both choices made by your kid are good if not the best.

Discord is relatively a private place with specific usage (chat and game). The social pressure it creates should be far less than what's been created by a "proper" public-publishing social media network such as TikTok or Instagram. On top of that, a small friend circle might have natural tendency to guard against outsiders.

On the Minecraft side, assuming it's just a server where your kid and his friends play on, then it should have the same effect as a small friend circle. Which means far less unexpected attack (less chance of generating hate) while keeping the benefit of sharing their creations/creativity with others.

Of course, you still have to know your kid and his friend to ensure the safety of the entire circle. But that's far more controllable than just letting your kid free-playing on TikTok Instagram etc (and get hurt by a total stranger who don't gives a damn care).

If you ask 10 different people why they are depressed, you'll get 10 different answers. This illustrated why I think the scientific method is the wrong way to go about understanding the human mind.

Also, if you ask a depressed person why they are depressed, they may not know exactly why they are depressed. I spent my entire high school years depressed. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated college before I realized the reason why I was depressed: it was because I had abusive parents. If you had asked me in high school why I'm depressed I would have said something like "I'm a bad person but I have no reason why". At the time I thought my parents treated me like I was a bad person was secondary to the actual problem.

If you really want insight on what makes the human mind depressed, then ask people who have overcame their depression. The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data". Everything has to be on a pie chart of a line graph or something like that. Every "study" has to be on a grand scale and then averaged together to make a single conclusion.

The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable. You can perform a "study" on a sample of people and get a result, and then replicate that exact same study on the exact same sample of people at a later time, and still get a different result. In order for the scientific method to be applicable, you have to be able to get the exact same result each time you replicate the study. This is not possible in psychology.

<< The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable.

I am willing to agree that it is still more art than science in its current state, but I personally think we are slowly moving towards a replicable mind after all -- a terrifying prospect, because it would truly prove 'free will' is an illusion. It currently seems impossible due to sheer number of factors with overlapping effects. I don't think it is impossible though.

I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad. It would represent a fundamental phase change in the way an individual interacts with the world, which I would wager would be antithetical to effective transmission of the belief.

Far more dangerous would be the 90% mark, where understanding of psychological determinism advances to a point where people still believe they have free will, but are wildly effective at influencing others. That looks like advertising today, but worse.

I don't believe in free will. I haven't really for about 20 years or so. However, I act as if I do, as I've always done. It's a habit I choose not to break. Changing to act as I believe would be too much for me to handle. I would need to rethink pretty much everything I do. It's a completely different set of axioms in every domain of human knowledge, ethics, behaviour and interaction.

I don't think I'm raving mad, but perhaps because I don't act on my beliefs, I don't fit your conditions?

However, I do believe the justice system would be better run with this in mind.

Not that I agree with your premise, but why would you personally adopt a cognitive dissonance? A healthy mind is generally regarded as satisfied with itself as it is free of self-contradictions.

I think behaving as if there is no free will is such a change from how I was raised and how 99.99% of society believes and functions, would require some Buddha-level strength of will, which I don't possess.

It's so different than all the constructs we've created, you can kind of throw "generally regarded" out the window, frankly :) (don't mean that to sound harsh if it does). All of psychology would need to be rewritten. By me? I guess?

The 3rd option is to try and convince myself of what I regard as a lie (that we have free will), which is also difficult, but probably easier?

> I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad.

This presumes that humans are some kind of ultra-rational uber-mensch that is incapable of ignoring inconvenient facts.

Truth of the matter is that an illusion of free-will is just as good as the real thing from the perspective of an individual human's mind.

Also I think you're confusing free-will and predictability, everyone kind of seems to do this for whatever reason, but they aren't mutually exclusive at all.

All of your actions can be the result of quantum mechanical effects, eg. "true randomness", but still be completely unpredictable beyond a certain time/noise horizon even with a 'perfect' simulation. But unless you want to suggest that the free-will arises from the quantum-foam (which I mean, is as unfalsifiable a claim as any other religion, so go for it), you kinda run out of room to fit the free-will.

As for my experience of not believing in free-will? Its been pretty much fine.

I suspect that belief in something free-will-like is pretty evolutionary adaptive, so I think we'd expect it to arise in most simulated minds subject to similar evolutionary pressures.

The only thing I haven't really figured out is why we aren't just p-zombies, but what is life without some mysteries, right? (And given this, I wholeheartedly agree with u/mikeschurman about the need for a justice system that isn't unnecessarily cruel)

I don't believe in free will at all. I never really did from a physics perspective, but after many years of meditating, I don't believe it at the highest levels of abstraction now either.

I don't understand how that is supposed to change anything at all about how an individual interacts with the world though?

Yeah I don't think we're getting there in our lifetimes, especially not with how neurobio/psych research has been progressing lately, but I agree it is theoretically possible. And along the way there are many imperfect models that could still be highly useful - I don't think replicable is a binary thing at this level of abstraction.

While some psychologists might not be aware of this (like the Reason criticism suggests... though mostly has the overworked angle), it seems to be almost insulting to suggest that researchers at his level are not ?

You'd be surprised how niche this sort of discussion is in neuropsych research. Is it because researchers aren't thinking enough about the big picture or because the NIH is incompetent and the researchers just go along with what they need to get funding? Idk, but either way it's not great. I suspect this problem exists in a lot of sciences but psychiatry in particular seems to have overcorrected for some of its less rigorous history.

That said, I don't think it's correct to say the scientific method can't apply. We absolutely have to be more careful about averaging over many people with different actual disease but the same current shitty label, and we also have to be better about looking at longitudinal signals. But there are ways to do this in a more scientific manner (e.g. involving well-defined testable predictions).

I agree that as part of this transitory period (especially with the sample sizes that most psych studies can feasibly get) there should be more synergy between qualitative human-focused approaches and what the by the book science people are doing. It's unfortunate how far behind research psychiatric practice can lag in some respects, and in other respects the psych researchers seem to not take practitioner observations too seriously these days.

You cannot rely on self-reporting as an accurate way to diagnose someone. You need to do single subject studies and doing a sample studies for this is obviously not the right way to go about it. Data collection is very important to understand human behaviour.

It’s saddening to hear about your years of depression. Parental abuse traumatizes deeply, and while I may not feel the same pain like you, I can imagine it is destroying life completely. I hope you can receive my and other people’s compassion and won’t relapse into depression.

I would still like to give some response on your content in hopes that you can benefit from it.

Psychology, or the part of what is accessible to the non-academic public, and Clinical Psychotherapy are related but different fields. Psychology alone can be very disappointing to people in pain - I can relate, and shared your sentiment, as I was in pain back then, too. Since I dug deep into the academic literature of Clinical Psychotherapy and the books for the general public, I realized I was just looking in the wrong corner of the library.

Compare Psychology being talking about what a nail is, to Clinical Psychotherapy being talking about how to construct a hammer and hammer the nail correctly into the wall. It’s related but not the same. And only one is really useful for us if our goal is to hang a beautiful painting on the wall.

Hope you find some inspiration from this. Whenever it comes back, please remember to get help quickly before the wounds get septic and require much more difficult intervention. There are good people out there.

This is just objectively not true. Population-level data has been used to establish all sorts of things about psychological disorders. You mention your experience of parental abuse causing depression: it absolutely does! And that relationship was established unequivocally decades ago by showing the correlation between adverse childhood events and the development of depression.

One of your specific complaints is that depressed people do not report the causes of their depression very accurately. This is also true! The unreliability of depressed people is emphasized in the diagnostic criteria, and a good psychologist will probe for other underlying issues. But researchers absolutely can identify causes of depression by supplementing self-reports with objective data.

> The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data".

Yeah, that's how science works. By collecting evidence you can make descriptive statements about the world. If psychologists didn't present data, they would be instead be rightly criticized for presenting data.

It sort of seems like you jump from the poor accuracy of depressed people's self reports to dismissing the entire field of psychology. Humans are complicated and messy, but we do know a ton about psychological disorders.

For what it's worth, I was also reacting to this assertion:

> The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

This was not my experience, and hasn't been the experience of others I know who have been depressed. The condition is often caused by an acute stressor, but in my case it was caused by a lack of social interaction and exercise during the pandemic. Trying to identify the "cause" of my feelings wasn't helpful because they weren't rational - instead I had to get out of bed, exercise, eat, and socialize until the episode cleared.

> girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less.

Not that it proves anything, but the converse argument, that depressed girls spend more time on social media or online in general, should also be examined. If the data could support this thesis to a similar degree, there is no conclusive statement about social media really inducing depression. It isn't just about effect size in my opinion but I don't see this problem answered.

That said, it doesn't need to be depression, there are other venues for negative influences. I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

The converse argument is far more plausible.

It's still just guessing. Can we please go from "plausible" to "we studied this"?

It's pretty hard to study beyond doubt though. You're not going to get much parental consent (or probably even institutional approval) to run a study where you require the experimental group of teenagers to spend 3+ hours a day on social media. And if the experimental group limits screentime, well I think parents of teens know how hard that can be to actually enforce across devices if the kid really wants to get on social media. You can't control what their peer groups are doing, and there are privacy limitations on what info you can even collect on specific phone activity from consenting adults, let alone teens.

In general, for studies of difficult long term behavior adjustments you basically need cooperative participants that will be honest when they slipped up. Teens are a tough population for this.

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup is below. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

Or the two are linked via feedback such that social media makes depression worse and both are causally linked. It doesn’t have to be a one-way relationship.

But that’s not the basis of his argument. His argument is based on the timing of when social media usage started. I mint argue 3-4 hours or social media use alone didn’t cause depression, but had to be combined with a causal factor

> I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

Yell at the cloud? Nicely done.

No, I am just German and this is a language disability.

Well, in English it became a beautiful pun.

Something has to be behind the seemingly coordinated rise in depression among children globally, that's the leading indicator he's using to assess the problem. His argument is that it can't be anything other than social media.

You're making the case in the micro scale: what is one person's relationship with depression and social media, and he's arguing in the macro scale. Something has caused depression to spike in children worldwide. What could it be?

> Something has caused depression to spike in children worldwide. What could it be?

Maybe the state of the world around them? Look at the world. Young millenials and gen z have no future. Politicians and boomers are fucking us over in every possible way. The world is running towards a rise of 4.4°C by 2100, we'll never be able to retire, we're in a situation where years of training and a degree still only get you unpaid internships, how could we possibly be happy in such a situation?

All social media did was show us we're not alone. In a situation where all the adults around you calmly live in the fire and say "this is fine", knowing you're not crazy, knowing you're justified in being worried, is empowering.

You are describing a commonly shared sentiment of today. This spike started nearly a decade ago, long before our current economic situation materialized.

To your point, who largely gets to decide which news stories get aggregated and which don't? Who has an outsized influence in shaping people's realities? By many metrics, times are tough, but by many other metrics, we are living in prosperous times as well.

> long before our current economic situation materialized

2008 was 15 years ago

Not disagreeing with your statements, but the key question in the research is why did depression spike in children worldwide _after 2012_.

At various points in my lifetime there have been reasons to be sad about the world - but what changed in 2012 that predominantly appears to affect teenage girls, and has been observed in several countries globally?

I'm saying that social media didn't cause the fears, but that social media ended the millenia of social pressure to just accept everything the way it is.

Cities once did the same, by increasing the population density you could hang out with people that had the same thoughts you did. But many countries successfully ended that through suburbanisation, isolating people once again.

Sounds like you could make an argument that cities make people depressed as well then.

I wonder if population density is a driving force for depression, both online and offline.

I'd buy that. I find cities miserable.

oooh thats an interesting thought, I really like that.

As a personal anecdote, I moved from rural New Mexico to a highly populated New England county and my baseline anxiety level noticeably increased.

Maybe the Mayans were right all along?

In all serious, 2012-2013 coincides with 1/3 and 1/2 of the American population's owning a smartphone. Maybe that has something to do with it?

If children/teens weren't exposed to so much online doom-mongering, they would be finding things to live for rather than fearing the future.

Even if the world is a bit shit, there's still plenty of opportunities for love, family, friendship, art, music, sport, and plenty more. Maybe even working towards solving one of the big problems we face, whether that's through science/tech or politics/economics?

It's exactly this "we didn't start the fire" mentality that caused the situation we're in.

If you want the world to change, you need to do that. You can't just wait for it to happen.

The Internet, through social media and clickbait news, encourages people to get ever-angrier and ever-more-radical until they attempt to 'change things' by smashing and burning, or justifying violence against political 'enemies'.

I don't know what the answers to the world's big problems are, but I'm pretty sure that smashing, burning, and pushing for violent revolution, insurrection, or civil war is not the answer.

Most of the world's problems aren't solvable by everyday people. Better to focus one's attention on oneself, work, family and community, where a difference might be made.

(Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to charity or something of that nature. But obsessively following world events will make you miserable and solve nothing.)

Perhaps if they were narrowly focused on religion? It seems to work for the Amish and other intensely devout groups.

I've always been an atheist, but I'm starting to wonder whether the decline of religion has done more harm than good. We've certainly lost some of the basic human decency that was once passed on via religion. The concept of forgiveness seems to be one glaring example, and the rise of selfish consumerism and online narcissism.

Maybe we need something to replace religion, without the dogma, oppression, and conflict. Something other than the online tribalism and activism seems to be filling that void for many...

> What could it be?

The state of the world? Better measurement and diagnosis of depression?

The child mental health industrial complex which started in the 2000's and has boomed over the last decade as parents have been bombarded with the message that they need to rush their kids off to a therapist at the slightest sign of normal teenage angst or they are bad parents. Schools have bought into this and participate in the messaging. Once under "treatment" kids are repeatedly told they have anxiety and/or depression which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would have been normal teenage angst which in most cases resolves itself quickly now becomes a long-term issue of course requiring more therapy. This drives even more kids to think they have anxiety and/or depression because their friends have it.

Lately I have started to see push back among my teenage daughter's friends' parents as they have realized that their kids have actually gotten quite worse since starting therapy. Many have started pulling their kids from therapy and quickly seen their kids mental state improve.

> The child mental health industrial complex

This seems like a rational, evidence-based position.

I find it very hard to believe that an otherwise healthy person can spiral into depression simply by hearing about it a lot.

Therapists have a long history of creating entirely false memories in children, telling them that they were abused by satanists as a child! Teenagers often go through some depression-like episodes due to love interests or whatever, so telling them they're medically depressed is a much smaller leap than what came previously.

Formerly it was easy to find on Google, but I guess Corona "fortified" health information and the results are really bad right now because you cannot match the topic accurately.

I had no success, but suggestibility of illnesses and conditions is a huge topic in psychology. There were many induced cases of conditions that stopped when the "patients" stopped therapy.

There are many reasons why patients would accept such a false diagnosis. I don't believe this is the case here, though.

It's not a strong argument to say "what could it be other than X? therefore, X"

> What could it be?

Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever. It's an entire regime change, and we're still operating with our old instincts/hardware, which expects to be raised in a village by a largely familiar and empathetic community. The farther we get from that model, the more we'll be stressed out (until and unless we upgrade our hardware somehow, or, more likely, die trying).

Social media is small potatoes in comparison to the changes that have happened already, and especially to those that are coming.

> Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever.

Granting all of that to be true (though I think it could be argued otherwise), those things started happening long before the sharp rise in depression among teen girls.

And it’s all due to the very existence of progressing technology. Dr. Skrbina in the book Technological Slavery makes the case that humanity has no control over the impacts of technology on humanity, and that technology has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it.

https://ia600300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

If the converse were true it wouldn't explain the rise in depression.

The longitudinal factor is essential in this though. Teen mental health issues skyrocketed since 2012. That's really the whole point of his rebuttal of Proposition 1.

We are back to the rates of the 1980s. What caused mental issues to be so high back the ? In the long term it’s the 90s that seem like a strangely low level of issues.

I agree the research doesn't conclusively show direction, but in my experience so many psychiatry correlates are chicken/egg. Depressed people tend to get less physical activity because of their depression symptoms, but too little activity can be quite bad for one's mood. Lots of bad cycles with positive (in a dynamical systems sense) feedback connections.

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup on causation. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

> In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly...Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor.

This is the problem I have with studies of "social media". It's like saying "the internet" causes problem, or "computers". These are overly broad categories and I refuse to believe someone interacting with tight-knit hobby groups on Facebook for 4 hours per day is suffering the same consequences as someone doom-scrolling photos of models on Instagram for 4 hours per day.

This is a great point and it's where I struggle to moderate my own social media consumption.

Is aimlessly scrolling my twitter feed a net benefit to my overall mood and well being? I'm 95% sure it's not.

Is spending 20-30 minutes browsing hacker news every morning a net benefit to my overall mood and well being? I'm not sure.

Yeah it's hard to know precisely, it's probably not a big negative either though - focusing on cutting down the aimless scrolling is probably a better priority than figuring out the effects of 30 minutes of HN (easier said than done ofc).

When it comes to teens and their friend groups it's even more complicated than that. The same basic activity on the same platform could be worlds apart depending on the real world group dynamics.

Still, I think at a certain point (with 4 hours per day surpassing that point IMO) it's hard to argue the activity remains beneficial. I'm not sure how someone would have time to do an actual hobby and spend a literal 4 hours per day on hobby social media groups, unless they're so wealthy they don't need to work, or they're not taking care of their health e.g. sleeping too little.

So I don't think it would be a terrible public health thing to encourage people to set personal social media time limits (on average), even if it may be premature scientifically to say much specifically. Of course it's critical to not pretend that research is further along than it actually is in any sort of proactive public health PSA.

The author agrees, but says many of the studies his critics point to were combining all computer use into generic "screen time".

If true, the research hasn't even focused heavily enough on "social media" combined, much less drilled down into different sites/apps/usage patterns.

Starting to get to the age where my oldest daughter is demanding access to social media because all her friends are using it. Surprised more parents aren’t aware of the harms.

I'm just moving into this phase as well. The same parents that said it was ridiculous kids have phones, are now getting their kids phones. I've heard that not having a phone is essentially like knowing the whole school is invited to party, except you. I'm really not sure what to do.

Maybe we give-in with clear boundaries and regular check-ins?

Give-in and Check-in support group :)

How old are kids these days requesting social media? I think at some point it's inevitable that they'll figure out a way on, so it's probably better to allow with boundaries and teach healthy habits early-ish. It can start getting socially detrimental to be completely off social media too, e.g. missing invites to larger gatherings.

But I have no idea how young we are actually talking here, my experience with this like a decade ago (so also not quite as harmful platforms) was handling the topic at around 13 yo.

At that time though completely restricting seemed a real gamble, some of the kids with no access snuck around and were the ones behind irresponsible shit that became school gossip. For example one kid without a Facebook made an account impersonating one of his teachers, used it to friend other teachers and see their private-ish info. Got easily caught because he also friended some of his real friends with the same account and even made some timeline posts back and forth, narrowed it down real quick.

My little cousins first started with an LTE Apple Watch. This allowed them to use iMessage to call/text friends and family, but prevented the use of any web browsing/social media. The downside is Apple Watches only last a few hours on LTE.

They are now ~12 years old and just received their first iPhones. Parental controls/screen time is used to limit their access to social media.

I personally refuse to use TikTok. But I know that is the main App children use today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to handle that situation. A teenager without access to TikTok today is absolutely going to be mocked by others.

It's definitely a coordination problem. While all the kids might be better off without access to social media, the one kid who doesn't when everybody else does gets a significant alienation downside, probably more than cancelling out the benefits.

That seems more like an upside if their 'peers' are indeed so easily addicted.

It seems preferable to be alienated from such a coordinated network of addicts.

It’s not a fault of their peers to be so easily addicted, rather the blame is on engineers working hard to make 2d images and text into dopamine drugs. Otherwise you’re right. People are so oversocialized that the very thought of alienation scares them. As if today’s society is the absolute pinnacle of goodness and everyone _must_ indulge in it as much as possible.

Humans are social creatures. Loneliness due to be alienated from your peers puts you at risk for mental health issues, potentially more so than the social media you alienated yourself from your peers to avoid. Hence the coordination problem.

Nearly half of all possible human actions puts one at risk for mental health issues, to varying degrees, so that doesn't seem like a sufficient justification for intentionally addicting oneself.

Your kid will thank you, don’t give him/her. It’s sad to see any soul being oversocialized.

Let's assume that it's hurting girls.

Why would that be?

Because we raise children wrong.

Women often complain that when men post photos of themselves on dating sites, that they do so either with buddies, or holding some trophy of some sort.

But that's simply because men are taught from a young age that their value is measured in what they can provide or achieve. Girls, on the other hand, are taught that THEY are valuable. We can go back hundreds of years and find evidence for this, as arranged marriages were usually a transaction between the parents of the couple: usually livestock, goods, and land for the hand of the maiden. Nobody's paying for a new son. Likewise, there's no show called Groomzilla where bridegrooms lose their minds attempting to plan a wedding.

In 2012, the "thigh gap" started becoming a popular trend among girls and women in the US. For many women, attaining such a thing is a nigh-impossible feat. Their bodies simply aren't built that way. Very few of my male friends thought that thigh gaps were even attractive at all. But women don't dress and exercise and eat for men, they do it for women and womens' perceptions.

Compare that to today. Our popular media is dominated by a rainbow of ethnicities with bodies to match. The Kardashians are bobbling around with breast augmentation, butt lifts, botox, microblading, and lip filler to seem more "exotic" and women are following suit. Nowadays it's not such a bad thing to have a naturally big butt with thick thighs, and many more women are on the internet proclaiming their weight to the public to show people what XXX pounds looks like on a X'XX" frame.

It's been 9 years and the thigh gap girls would be out of place today. Many would consider it unattractive.

It's not social media.

It's that we teach girls that their physical appearance and their wardrobe is what gives their lives value. That's what you have to fix. Everything else is just vigorous hand waving in an attempt to sound intelligent.

Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s; extensive public awareness of climate change doesn’t imply a disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in the mid-late 2000s.

I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.

Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective.

A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that.

And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.

Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.

Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era.

Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative.

Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues.

Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity.

The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.

Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.

If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic, fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom?

You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian you aren't even making sense, as is normal.

Whether you can make sense of what I am writing is out of my control.

However there is nothing in what I said that isn't factually correct. If that makes me boomer contrarian the so be it.

Considering that:

The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive amount even proportionally compared to China, there's definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint. Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies. Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the trash like everything else here because nobody bothers with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned out because the only people even bothering to return plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the fucking effort.

The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This country had better public transit that was muscled out by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die. Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a contributor to making the world just a little bit more warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of rail commuting and freight transport. We're twiddling our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and become unusable, because its cheaper to move less material over trucks.

These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are arguably less safer SUVs

You have to come up with a better alternative that doesn't take things away.

Your examples are good examples of things that are not better alternatives, they are worse.

I don't think most people realize just how unique a material plastic for instance is.

> The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.

You don't need to go that far. Fission and geothermal can work at scale today and largely solve the impending climate trainwreck today. We haven't adopted them in droves not because of some technological limitation, but rather because they're more expensive on balance sheets (which don't account for negative externalities) and because the fossil fuel industry has successfully manipulated the public into equating "renewable energy" with "things fundamentally incapable of providing base load".

They don't scale and they don't provide enough energy density to do provide energy for new types of solutions.

OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage.

There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.

Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.

agree, whats your point?

That phenomena like Greta are possible all the time in all kinds of situations

It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.

As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.

In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.

I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.

It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.

No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with.

That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence. Got any?

Well provide me with a scientifically proven consequence of climate change and I will tell you how we deal with it.

> I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness

> It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already starting to be visible.

It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories or pseudoscience.

I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track record of being correct in the end.

Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I might be completely wrong.

And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity. Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change doomsaying.

And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too, which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate change actually happening?

I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.

It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.

If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.

The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.

> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state

I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.

I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.

I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects.

They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired.

Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.

>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.

This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.

The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.

Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.

> This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

Yes, but this is only part of it and once again is an easy way to blame corporations. It's not just easy for them to tell people to recycle. It's also really easy for people to recycle and feel good about themselves while not doing much.

To really impact climate change, we need societal change and that has to come from everyone. People, companies, government all need to change, we can't keep pointing fingers at each other, but that's what we're all doing.

>is an easy way to blame corporations

It really isn't. The 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions have a massively outsized impact on the climate. They have got exceptional PR and have done a spectacular job of diffusing their responsibilities and protecting their bottom lines at the expense of the planet.

It's easy to buy into their propaganda though.

> Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.

What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?

The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.

Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.

There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.

I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.

So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?

---

[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-pe...

The 100 corporations thing is silly. They aren't out there polluting for the fun of it, they're making stuff for people and organizations.

If people and governments and companies stop buying gas, the pollution on Chevron's ledger for oil extraction and refining will plummet as they get stuck with smaller markets like plastic manufacturing.

Those dastardly 100 corporations are emitting to make stuff for you.

They're making stuff for people who get no input into how that stuff is made, much of which they can't just stop consuming.

Of course people have an input. You can buy it from someone else who makes it a different way, or not at all.

Let's leave aside "not at all," because that's often not a viable option. Let's also remember, we're talking about reaching net zero emissions. For instance, where do I buy carbon neutral food?

You can't materialize those alternatives if they don't exist. And, when we're talking about making things in more sustainable ways by emitting less carbon, because carbon externalities aren't accounted for, the sustainable way is more expensive than the dirty way. So, capitalist corporations being the profit maximizing machines that they are, inevitably choose the dirty way.

Then there are the energy inputs to account for.

See also this comment by another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630362

The fact that Nestle still exists should be proof enough for anyone that it literally doesn't matter how horrible a large corporation is. There is no activism route to correcting these companies behavior. Only legislation with teeth will work. That we'll all collectively decide to stop doing business with bad companies is nothing but a libertarian fantasy.

Is there a shortage of Nestle competitors ? The fact that people still buy Nestle tells you how much the masses actually care about Nestle's behavior, in dollar terms. ie, less than the savings that Nestle presents.

Using legislation "with teeth" to force something that the masses don't want is autocracy, not democracy.

Thanks for writing this, people in general seems to completely be missing this point. Oil companies pollute to provide us with:

Fuel for our cars. Fuel for shipping all the goods we want cheaply made in Asia. Fuel for planes to business meetings that could be done online. Fuel for planes we take to mass consume alcohol in the Caribbean. Plastics for packaging all that stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the cheap clothing we wear twice and throw out.

Oil companies are just one example. And alternatives for most of this this are all more expensive, which is why most people don't want to switch to better alternatives, like:

Buy locally sourced produce. Don't buy imported avocados, bananas, coconuts. Buy locally sourced meat. Get whole chickens and eat everything. Make a stock from the leftovers. Buy organic cotton clothing. Or figure out what clothing you can get that's locally produced. Buy furniture from a local furniture craftsman. Don't replace things that aren't broken. Don't go to McDonald's, go to a local burger restaurant that doesn't import 'Irish grass fed beef'. Take a train to a vacation destination nearby.

For some of us, all of this may be obvious, but for the majority of people it isn't. And as long as we keep blaming companies and then sit back, nothing will ever change.

But there are many ways to make all of this stuff. Many times there are better ways and less harmful ways, but those are basically always less profitable.

This is capitalism and the one and only objective is profit. It's never going to be working towards having a sustainable world, getting better stuff, getting less useless stuff, etc.

We don't need half the stupid stuff that's being sold to us and we keep buying it because that's how the system is setup.

So yes, they aren't polluting for the fun of it. They are doing so for the profit of a few.

This is a common but equally silly complaint- people were denuding their islands of trees and hunting animals to extinction long before anything approximating capitalism. Socialism's externality record isn't amazing either.

Disagreeing on what things are important is just the human condition.

Sure, but we evolved and now we know better.

Except with the current state of affairs, we know it's the wrong thing to do but still keep doing it in favor of profits.

It makes no sense to compare how things were ages ago (even quite recently, in fact) to where we are now. This kind of dismissal is low effort and deflects the real issue because nobody wants to admit just how bad it is.

For a very recent example, it became public Exxon knew the harm they would be doing to the planet through fossil fuels and they couldn't care less. Gotta increase that shareholder value.

>The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations

Read the source carefully. This is not what the BBC or the original paper [1] said. This is a meme that came from tabloids and Reddit. What it does say is that top 100 fossil fuel producers, produce fossil fuels that cause 70% of greenhouse gasses. Obviously, you aren't going to dig for and refine oil in your backyard, so a corporate entity is going to do it for you. Despite the anti-capitalist slant of this meme, the largest producers are all state-owned: "China Coal" (which isn't even a single entity), Gazprom, Aramco, etc. The implication that global warming is the fault of these "corporations" is especially nonsensical because it implies that all fossil fuel producers should conspire to limit their production. Basically, this is describing OPEC on steroids and would make even John Rockefeller blush.

[1] https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-...

Fossil fuel corporations will have to "conspire" to reduce production though, unless they can conspire to come up with some way of extracting said fuels and allowing them to be used without the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The massive amount of capital investment that currently goes into producing fossil fuels needs to start being directed towards producing energy in a manner compatible with maintaining a habitable planet, and it's hard to see that happening until we collectively agree that it's not reasonable to profit from fossil fuel extraction and combustion. And yes, the governments of countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are absolutely critical to that effort - until there's a real sense such governments are prepared to prepared to make radical changes in how their economies function then there's little the rest of us can do to alter the trajectory of global emissions. On that basis as an individual I'm happy to make lifestyle changes that may happen to also reduce my overall ecological footprint but at least bring some other benefit (driving less being the obvious one - even if it somehow caused more carbon emissions, the upsides of spending less time sitting in traffic are way too numerable to dismiss).

> The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green stance? I can understand people being sick of the mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their money.

I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.

I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.

We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.

Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.

Regarding public transport a conductor enforcing code of conduct would be nice.

Jobs!1!!

>The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore

This is because activism today has completely become synonymous with raising awareness. While raising awareness is important, it's also the easiest part of activism, since the rise of the internet, so it's what people gravitate towards the most. That's how we end up with so much doomposting and doomscrolling on social media.

Individual action served as the foundation of Civil Rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts. It may be difficult to reason why walking a hour to work every day in the hot, Alabama sun rather than taking this bus will expand their rights, but history taught us that it was important. Meanwhile, there isn't a similar coordinated effort to carpool and seek alternative means of commuting today. What was also important were donations that funded legal challenges to discriminating businesses and municipal governments. Again, you don't see grass-roots organization funding lawsuits against corporations that are illegally polluting. Most important of all is ironically lobbying. Without the lobbying efforts of the NAACP, the Civil Rights protection may not have made it through, and if they had, they would have been substantially weaker. Again, this isn't something that is ever suggested by climate activists, despite their awareness of its importance. As Haidt implies, unlike doomscrolling, these types of activism are actually empowering.

Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some "existential crisis" among young people are BS.

Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant evidence.

This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly younger ones (and I’m in my mid-20s), who are extremely anxious about climate change. They’ve sought mental health services because of their worries. I don’t think that’s particularly unique.

I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is the point I was attempting to make with a “weaker” version of Haidt’s argument.

I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is because people don't really understand statistics nor history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in that future is still a far better hand than all of your ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at least with that medical history. That's something to celebrate.

Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over, and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have distant relatives who weren't human and only became human due to selective pressures from the environment at the time. We should expect to change when the environment does, dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other species driving a climate change on earth previously (there were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and others), of actually being globally aware of climate change.

Isn't this a social media problem as well? Climate change is a hot topic on social media. When we are frequently exposed to doom-porn, we tend to develop a bleak outlook.

Read the comment again: that’s the “weaker” argument, one that Haidt fails to make.

> But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it

Many people have done that in actual studies. Here's one example: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5.... It's not just people projecting and thinking "I'm worried about climate change so the kids must be as well."

I have seen posters on this very website claim that they will not be having children as a direct result of the information they have received about climate change.

of course, it's difficult to determine how much of that is ex post facto reasoning as justification for a decision that was already made for completely different reasons…

AGW: Anthropogenic global warming?

Even in just the last few months there have been stories posted here about specific people who killed themselves stating it was because of worry about climate change.

> a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises.

That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic, I’d say Western people under 40 years of age (which also greatly matches this forum’s users, I would say). But as Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match that “doom” feeling, and looking around at people my age and older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the coming climate Apocalypse is shared.

Which matches the topic of the article, right?

I was contesting OP's point of view which was implying that everyone is on board with the climate doomerism, I hadn't read the article.

It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc. But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents, there was no massive uptick in mental illness.

I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions in favor of the global good). Most people don’t think world peace is achievable, so it’s understandable why that sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.

The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)

Two points stand out:

* At least in the US, the fear of nuclear annihilation was partially offset by the belief (which was never officially substantiated) that the government would adhere to a policy of rational deterrence, i.e. MAD. It’s hard to find polls on belief in MAD, but friends and family I’ve talked to have stated that it was a source of reassurance during all but the most stressful moments of the Cold War.

* The stress of the Cold War also coincides with the longest period of peace and greatest increase in quality of life in the Western world. An intuitive explanation of why suicides didn’t increase under the stress of the Cold War is that life was otherwise improving for most Westerners in tangible ways. The relative stagnancy of the last 30 years is a significant departure from that.

But you also had Samantha Fox singing "Touch me now!" while surrendering to the spirits of the night ;->

Yes, but The Sun was banned in my family, so we only "benefited" from her music.

They aren't the same. Climate change activism states that you - yes you - are a bad person for not radically changing your lifestyle. Those changes may not even be achievable, but that doesn't change your moral culpability. Through your wanton lust for warm homes and nice red meat you destroy the world leaving nothing for the children. It's an incredibly moralized story.

The other examples you name are different. IRA terrorism? Not caused by you, not influenceable by you, nobody claims it is. MAD? Likewise, it's all decisions by politicians you never met who live far away.

Also, IRA terrorism probably wasn't going to affect you or your children and with MAD there was always a chance that it wouldn't happen. This was never in doubt.

The climate change narrative is uniquely calibrated to destroy people's mental health, and especially the mental health of over-socialized teenage girls, because it directly blames them for the worst possible things (literally the end of the world) and demands they change, whilst simultaneously telling them they actually can't change and the world is inevitably doomed no matter what. It also rather uniquely expects you to reject the evidence of your own eyes. The world is clearly not burning or on fire, the Pacific islands are clearly not sinking and politicians clearly do not believe there's any actual crisis, yet nobody is allowed to point those things out without social exile of the type that's especially dramatic for teenage girls.

Many religions make a far stronger moral argument about our failures as individuals, and yet arguably have far less influence over young minds than they have in the past. I can't say I've seen any evidence that teenagers (including my own) are especially burdened with any personal sense of guilt over their lifestyle and its contributions towards ecological damage. Whereas I'd certainly accept there is a sense of pessimism about the future health of our planet and what it might mean for what sort of existence they might have in 40 or 50 years time - and absolutely a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, given the fact very little positive change in behaviour has been seen by those in the best position to do so.

They explicitly don't! Christianity is very clear that whilst everyone is born into sin, Jesus died to cleanse us of that sin and God is forgiving of sinners who repent. In the Christological religions at least, there is always a way back to the good path. You may have to pray for forgiveness, or do a confession. But you can do it. In climatological religion, there is no way to the good path no matter what you do.

You can't ignore the reality that even many streams of Christianity regularly insisted on certain perfectly natural behaviours being "sinful" and worthy of eternal punishment in hell. That surely must have had some effect on the mental health of believers, but there's no real evidence our collective mental health has improved now that the majority of us no longer buy into any sort of doctrine of being born as sinful and needing to plead to supernatural beings for forgiveness etc. So I'm struggling to see how the possibility that a percentage of modern-day young adults may have occasional feelings of guilt about their lifestyle knowing it's making some small contribution toward long term ecological deterioration could be significantly impacting mental health. What's arguably more concerning is those (both individuals and businesses) who make token gestures towards behaviour changes that claim to be for the sake of the planet etc. as though it gives them some sort of moral superiority, especially given there's little genuine analysis done as to whether the changes really are of any net benefit. It may give some artificial boost in sense of self-worth and short term improvement in mental health to the gesture-makers but is at best a distraction from what's really needed.

I'm not a Christian anymore, so I might be misrepresenting the religion here, but I think they would say that you only go to hell if you don't repent your sins. And the whole Hell/Satan thing was never a major part of my own Christian upbringing from what I recall, that's a much bigger thing in medieval religion.

As for having a bad effect on mental health, well, the inquisitions and holy wars were pretty mad in retrospect.

Nobody is claiming that climate change is significantly impacting mental health, at least not yet. Even Haidt's data shows an increase over a very small baseline, whether that's significant or not boils down to whether you're talking in relative or absolute terms. But you seem to be talking from the perspective of a mentally healthy person. Obviously, a mentally healthy person doesn't get so upset about climate change they kill themselves, but we risk being circular. A small number of highly susceptible people will fall prey to the narrative of un-cleansable guilt and un-solvable doom, and lose their stability. It's already appearing in news and anecdotal reports.

>> there's little genuine analysis done as to whether the changes really are of any net benefit.

No, of course not. Anyone who tries to do such analysis rigorously has to dive into the data, and if you do that you immediately becomes a skeptic of both claimed solutions and claimed problems, so your views are now unspeakable in polite society. Given that it's inevitable that you're only going to "see" people who aren't doing genuine analysis as a result.

>> It may give some artificial boost in sense of self-worth and short term improvement in mental health but is at best a distraction from what's really needed

Which is what, exactly? Notice how you spend time attacking those who refuse to do what's "really needed" without spelling out what that is, thus engaging in the token gesture of cheap online activism. If you're about to give some absurd policy that boils down to most of the population dying off or living in absolute poverty, and which could only be implemented by a dystopian global dictatorship, then great, you're just proving why most people prefer to engage in what you call token gestures.

Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we regularly tell ourselves about technology.

1) Technology is bad

2) Technology is good

3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism)

4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism)

5) Technology is an accelerant

Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with #3.

Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I’d say that Haidt is blaming the wind for the fire: he’s confusing the thing that accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for things themselves. This resembles his own “map and territory” claims about those responding to him.

all of these could be true simultaneously.

To borrow a quote from one of your other posts:

> climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable.

For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them.

So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

>I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions)

Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".

What is special about the year 2012 in regard to these fears?

Most of the graphs he shows actually inflect earlier, around 2010 or so. This is around the time the media to start systematically hardening its line on all things climate, and the "great awokening" that started flooding the news with claims the world was dominated by systemic hate and -isms. The two are related, both being ideological in nature.

Oh that’s a neat theory. Is there any data to support it or should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio?

There's lots of data, yes. Rozado has many n-gram plots that show this happening around 2010 for some terms and 2012-ish for other terms:

https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd

The huge spikes in terms like inclusion, racist, sexist, climate change, global warming, etc is clear, all starting around either 2010 or 2012 (except for global warming, which spiked a few years earlier and then was replaced almost overnight in 2010 by the vaguer term climate change, which shows massive growth in the last 10 years).

A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.

>> "should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio"

I thought that would be considered racist fat shaming these days, but I guess it doesn't count if the person you're offending isn't on your team?

This part seems deeply questionable to me:

> Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from the current 13 (which was set in 1998 before we knew what the internet would become) to 16, and enforce it by mandating that the platforms use age verification procedures, a variety of which already exist

Yes, age verification procedures exist, but I don't know of any that are actually effective without also being privacy/security nightmares. Haidt's analysis of "what damage is done" seems to assume an idealized implementation that never incorrectly flags an adult or causes a leak of personal information.

I have mixed thoughts about this.

I think there are at least two or more factors and social media is a part of it, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum.

The reason I think this is that there seems to be a small minority of people who have the skills and mental models to use social media as a tool without adverse impact, as a well as another minority of people who seem to be able to remain distanced or minimal users of social media, without adverse impact.

These two groups seem to suggest that some kind of key missing life skill when combined with a need for social connection leaves people uniquely vulnerable to problems with social media.

My somewhat clueless guess about this is that people aren't situated to understand distance, authenticity, and relationships sufficiently. Maybe part of the problem is that many people are so socially starved of authentic and healthy loving relationships of all kinds in their lives, that many people can both know this but still be vulnerable. In some sense, maybe vulnerability rises because social media is a poor but just good enough placebo for loneliness?

I am also convinced that poor parenting compounds whatever is going on. Anyone who puts their 5th grader on Facebook or similar is a terrible parent IMO. Just the same as anyone who uses the iPad as a babysitter is a terrible parent IMO. But I suspect in many cases poor parenting is an artifact of parents who feel so trapped in unstable lives that hey can't feel stable or devote time comfortably to their kids. So maybe yet another factor.

    anyone who uses the iPad as a babysitter is a terrible parent IMO

Do you include a draw/colouring/painting app? That seems OK to me. It is a digital form of colouring books.

I mean using as a babysitter is a specific style of behavior where parents just give kids devices to avoid parenting, not so much dependent on the specific apps. "I'm talking to Jane, go play with the iPad."

Wow. I both respect this post, while being annoyed at its direction. It is very respectful in the intro, by explicitly not trying to be attacks against the critics. However, it then is entreating the readers to pick a side for most of the rest.

I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should look at how you can add to and learn from the data. Odds are high that both sides have some points that are worth picking up, such that picking a side is almost certainly shutting you out of some good ideas.

My personal push would be to say that claiming mental health became a problem in 2010s is absurd. It has long been a problem, as evidenced by such easy examples as Columbine. Before that, it was likely a largely local problem. In that you didn't hear about the kids that were having trouble, but they were there.

Does this contradict the assertions of the troubles of social media? I don't think so. Just don't think you have shielded your kids from all modern sources of mental ill by simply keeping them away from social media.

This is like thinking that drinking coffee or wine is de facto healthy for you. Likely, the health benefits are as much on what you were not drinking instead. Such that, keeping kids from social media by keeping them engaged with others around them is likely a net positive. By how much of that is keeping them engaged in a participatory way, versus keeping them apart? Such that, if you can get them engaging with things in a healthy way, you can make everyone in that area healthier. You can see this with online groups that are healthy. Yes, there will be some level of banning, as we all have capacities. But the healthy crowds engage. They don't just shout down. Even when they have to deal with people shouting, attempts are made to moderate.

But the author isn't arguing that mental health only became a problem in 2010, if I understand your post correctly. They're claiming it became more of a problem because of social media use, particularly among girls, no?

If by "Columbine" you're referring to the shooting, then that's only a US thing and doesn't apply to other countries.

Right, and in that I can mostly get behind. Again, I don't think the researcher is wrong. I think it is wrong to "pick a side" and only buy in to that.

You are right that I was referring to the shooting. But you will have to tell me why that isn't a mental health thing. Do I think it is also a gun control issue? Certainly, but even without the guns, those kids were still very mentally unstable. And growing up in that time, I knew many mentally unstable people. Luckily, they didn't have access to guns.

Similar statement could be about social media. Before 2010s, they didn't have access to social media. My assertion would be that they were likely still there.

Now, is mental illness contagious? I'd wager that is probable. But I don't know for sure. And I'm going to guess you need evidence and an open mind to both "sides" presented in this post to progress to an answer.

I could definitely imagine that shootings and the subsequent drills have a negative effect on children's mood. What I meant was that this effect would be limited to the US, whereas the data presented in his articles seems to often cover a much larger part of the world.

Apologies, I meant that the negative moods and mental instability predating these events. I am open to the idea that they could be getting exacerbated by them. It is odd now that I have kids. I have no doubt I will change thoughts as years go by. In ways that I can't fully understand, yet. The way that anxiety clearly hits some of my family more than others is hard not to see.

> I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should look at how you can add to and learn from the data.

Haidt is sufficiently convinced by the existing data that he feels strongly that what is called for is action, not more data collection (or perhaps, action alongside more data collection).

You are apparently not as convinced as Haidt. That's OK, but you need to consider the perspective of someone who feels that we've already established what is happening with sufficient confidence that we need to move onto action.

And as Haidt says: what is the cost if the skeptics are wrong vs. if the alarm ringers are wrong?

Yeah, but I can say we should agree with his proposals without "picking his side." We probably should take a lot of the actions he is proposing. But we should not dismiss the "other side" while doing so.

Edit: I see I should not have said "the data" in what to learn from. Rather, I am arguing that we can and should learn from both sides here. For things that are more actionable, taking the actions will let us learn even more. But, and this is huge, it could be that taking these actions does nothing. The "do something" attitude that is prevalent in all society is often wrong. Particularly about what should be done.

It is truly remarkable to which great lengths people go to justify their unhealthy relationship with social media. It is nearly the same as telling an alcoholic they have an alcohol problem and then hearing excuse after excuse and re-framing and mental gymnastics to jump around the elephant in the room.

I'm glad write-ups like this one are a thing.

Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass.

> Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass.

And yet, their generation seems to be the most addicted these days, and the most unhinged when it comes to following conspiracy theories.

Well of course they are, they poor dears grew up in a world without it and while there are exceptions, most of them lack any natural immunity. Just look at people over 50 (present company excepted, of course) trying to use the web without an ad blocker.

This is a good point.

I suspect that one reason is that "digital natives" have been raised with the tech, so have sort of a "natural resistance," yet the oldtimers were hooked almost immediately.

For myself, I have been using electronic communications, almost since they were invented (BBSes and UUNet, anyone?), so I have "more resistance" than most of my peers.

Yet, I still have to stay off of Facebook. This is pretty much my only social media venue. The main reason I stay, is because people play [relatively] nice, hereabouts.

I suspect that those who grow up as social media “natives” will have some social norms that protect them somewhat, whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will not have learned the social norms that can protect them.

We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social norms with alcohol. For example, it’s quite common for people to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of the day. It’s not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but it’s “just not done”. We can easily see the benefits of not drinking at the start of the workday.

I’m not going to guess what kind of social media norms people are developing in general. For me I only follow boring, topic-focused people on Twitter, and I only use the “Following” feed. Nobody is making me do this.

>I suspect that those who grow up as social media “natives” will have some social norms that protect them somewhat, whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will not have learned the social norms that can protect them.

Agreed. A lot of older generations fall for a lot of satire and comment on things as if they're 1 on 1 with you instead of realizing that it's a public forum. However, a lot of younger generations are incredibly aware that everything they do and say could potentially be public or go viral. That brings a whole host of other problems and challenges with it.

The ultimate problem is every incentive goes against a "healthy" social media. Companies don't want a "healthy" social media as they're focused on engagement, screen time, content, and advertisers. Most of the primitive portions of our brains don't want "healthy" social media either, as it craves the rush of more likes and followers. I don't think that the logical, self-aware portions of our psyche are going to change the direction of how things are going.

> We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social norms with alcohol. For example, it’s quite common for people to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of the day. It’s not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but it’s “just not done”.

I find this point quite interesting. I didn't drink alcohol until I was nearly 30. I skipped by most of the formative alcohol consumption experiences most people have.

And, incidentally, I don't seem to follow the same norms about what time of day it's okay to drink: I'll happily have a beer well before noon.

The non-native social media people have grown up fully on in-person relationships where trust is very important. They apply the same trust to people on social media that they do to their friends and family. The social media natives treat social media as different things.

Likely because that generation was raised to believe everything they were told, starting from an early age with school, religion, then with television and newspapers, etc.

The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. and they learned to think more critically about what they are reading.

That is an awfully broad brush you are painting with there. It's also painfully obvious which of the two groups you are in.

Yes, quite possibly overgeneralization there. Thinking on it....

I'm probably over indexing on it, but the nocebo effect did not begin and end with a generation. People are remarkably influenced by what they are told. Even if they know it is unlikely or not true.

> The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience

Except that talk radio is way older than that, and it was the same kind of content.

Yes, I'm likely wrong there....

As a side note, one important change in the modern times is the ability to cross check information from a wide range of sources easily.

Not according to this:

Social media, gen z wins: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314973/global-daily-tim...

Phones in general, millennials win: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/which-generation-....

this glued to devices meme is tired. look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine. i know it seems crazy, but humans reading information is a constant in public, and the only reason you didn't see more of it in the past is that you were part of the group consuming media, while also assigning intellectual value to the fact that a periodical is 'printed on paper' as if destroying a tree to make paper legitimizes the content in some way that a digital download of the same content can't.

get a better argument

Newspapers and magazines didn't microtarget their audience or have endless streams of content. This is like saying "look at all the people riding horses in old pictures, cars can't be that bad".

That's not even getting into the level of corporate surveillance social media and online advertising have brought us.

what on earth are you talking about? newspapers have existed to control the narrative since inception. look at how they’ve been used, and listen to the lead editors talk about using their influence.

it’s a slightly less targeted ad, sure, but my dad only reads conservative papers, and they don’t seem to be written with a common perspective

The difference is that a new article carefully chosen to fit your preferences doesn't magically appear on your lap every time you finish reading (or rejecting if you don't like it) the previous one. You also can't swift quickly through hundreds of headlines to pick what interest you the most when you are dealing with physical medias. You are stuck with whatever you brought with you.

> newspapers have existed to control the narrative since inception

That's not even remotely close to what they said and is clearly just your own personal grievance with newspapers

Were you there? I was at the tail end of it - I used to take the train regularly in the mid 90s (to the present day). I remember some people with newspaper but it definitely wasn’t everyone.

And I just found about 15 pictures in a quick Google images search from the 70s and 80s that disprove your assertion.

yes, but my experience is speaking to caltrain in the 90s

That's like saying there's nothing wrong with giving thalidomide to pregnant women, because pregnant women have always taken herbal supplements.

The obvious difference is that newspapers contain a relatively small amount of information packaged in a non-interactive, non-targeted, and less mind-absorbing format. People don't read newspapers for the dopamine hit, but for lack of something else to do.

that’s not true at all. the process of learning is a dopamine hit. the concept that phones made us antisocial is dumb, it’s a default. arguing to end phones avoids dealing with the problem

> the process of learning is a dopamine hit

Perhaps reading newspapers produces some dopamine, but I imagine it is tiny in comparison to the effects of smartphones, and does not provide the user with the easy option to keep scrolling for more dopamine.

> That's like saying there's nothing wrong with giving thalidomide to pregnant women, because pregnant women have always taken herbal supplements.

Your analogy is better than you think, because in fact there isn't anything wrong with giving pregnant women thalidomide at all!

You just have to not do it within a very carefully defined range of time within pregnancy, but before and after that it's as safe as milk.

Turns out, the same process that makes thalidomide horribly teratogenic also makes it an absolutely first-rate cancer drug with few side-effects even in pregnancy.

Interesting. I've looked for sources on that and found a couple of sites saying that the sensitive period is 20-37 days after conception, but come up short of studies on anything later.

This webpage seems to suggest the risks are unknown after first trimester: https://mothertobaby.org/fact-sheets/thalidomide-pregnancy/

Same from this university classroom material (p.2): https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/MediaLibraries/URMCMedia/life...

look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine.

I know the image you have in your mind. I've seen it, too.

What you actually mean is "I saw this one picture on social media of a bunch of people on a train all reading newspapers at the same time because war just broke out."

Using that as a logical crutch for social media addiction is like the alcoholic saying "everybody does it."

I grew up in the 1980s. Everyone sat and read a newspaper or a book on the bus or the train back then.

> note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine

There is one popular picture where everyone is reading newspapers in a bus. And just like now it is not true that everyone is reading on phone on public transport. It was even less so before, because not everybody carried magazines with them all the time.

Narrative content is not the same as interactive content. The quality of the content is not the same. I'm not sure what compelled you to make your point in the presence of such obvious points.

This is quite a big pond, my friend. The "get a better argument" line might go over well in your social circle, but HN is a big place with many smart people. Have some humility.

I don't think the issue with phones is that people aren't engaging with each other in public spaces. I'll stipulate that it has never been the norm to engage with strangers on public transport. But I see a number of other differences between then and now.

For one, I don't think it was common for people to take a newspaper out of their pocket and look at it during social events with friends and family whenever conversation slowed down for a moment, or whenever it pinged with a notification. I observe my own wife spending far more time looking at her phone today than she ever spent reading a book before. Ten years ago, she might get lost in a book for a day or two, if it was a really good one. Now she walks around the house with her phone in-hand at all times. I had to pry myself back from that after starting to notice the same behavior in myself.

> look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones.

That's a strawman, the issue is kids spending their time on devices rather than outside doing real play with real people. That sort of thing.

At least with alcohol it's more socially acceptable to say to friends "I've seen how much you've been drinking lately and I'm concerned about you" - you can't really say the same for tiktok or instagram use.

Sure you can. Well maybe you can't, but the kids these days even have a phrase for it - go touch grass.

Yeah, there's a whole lexicon around this sort of thing. "Go touch grass" is a fantastic one for it's punchiness, but "terminally online" is fun one, too. Add in a healthy dose of sarcasm, and labels like "influencer" and "gamer" and the like get used as pejoratives often, too.

One of cited objections is absurd:

> I don't trust any area of research where the odds ratios are below 3.

Then what’s the point of researching even slightly more subtle effects? This person might as well start smoking: they wouldn’t trust any amount of evidence that smoking causes cardiovascular disease — the odds ratio seems to be 2.

Yeah, that seems completely absurd. If the experiments are rigorous enough, and the p value is low enough, you should be able to trust the results, no matter how small the effect is.

If, for example, research shows that social media use increases one's risk of depression by, say, between 32% and 34%, with p < 0.000001, they're going to discount a result that only has a 1-in-a-million chance of being a fluke simply because it can only show a 1/3 rise in risk, rather than a 3x rise?

That's not skepticism. That's dogma.

Yes but in very large datasets, isn't it the case that you end up finding correlations for many things at very low p values? That is (one of the reasons) why effect size matters. Still, the "odds ratios are below 3" requirement seems excessive.

If you're just looking for any correlations, then p-values aren't really applicable due to the sharpshooter fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

You need a specific hypothesis to test before you start examining (or better, collecting) your data for a p-value to make any sense.

Of course you should trust the results and publish them anyway (or so should happen in an ideal world ;) ), but they may be disregarded as uninteresting or unworthy in their domain when reviewed.

P-value and effect sizes by themselves are not meaningful enough, you should always consider the full context of the experiment, subject of study and domain.

Edit/PS: 3x or more is excessive though.

In fairness, the odds ratio for "smoking causes lung cancer" is about sixteen.

Haidt's quote leaves out the following explanation:

> That doesn't mean I only believe in 3–1 or greater effects. If you can show any 3–1 effect, then I'm prepared to consider lower odds ratios. If teenage girls with heavy social media use are three times as likely to be in the experimental group for depression 12 months later than otherwise similar teenage girls that don't use social media, then I'm prepared to look at evidence that light social media use has a 1.2 odds ratio, or that the odds ratio for suicide attempts is 1.4. But without a 3–1 odds ratio as a foundation, it's my experience that looking at any random data can produce plenty of lesser odds ratios, which seldom stand up.

I found this a little confusing, but I think what Brown is saying is that if all of the effects found in an area of research (not a single study) are small, it's probably not a real phenomenon.

I don't think that that explanation makes sense, or actually rebuts the point. If the true odds ratio of the effect being studied is 1.8, I don't know why Brown expects that a study of a 1.8 would ever produce an odds ratio of 3. That would mean the study was terrible - it got the answer badly wrong!

Even with this explanation, Brown is effectively saying that any effect with an odds ratio of less than 3 cannot be studied. I don't think that position makes any sense.

And also, an odds ratio of 1.4 means social media makes it 40% more likely one will be depressed. That is a massive effect. I don't understand why people are saying these effects are small.

Kudos to Mr Haidt. I wouldn't have the patience to explain over and over again why being addicted to your phone and comparing your looks to global superstars makes girls lonely and depressed. People will argue over percentage points of an r-value instead of simply asking three girls whether using Instagram four hours a day makes them happy.

“But correlation isn’t causation!!””*

*causation is impossible to prove outside of STEM

Okay but how are we supposed to get teen girls not to compare themselves to the looks of global stars?

This existed before social media. At best I can see it being a catalyst here and so sure limit or ban social media (at least for under 18s ~ 25s, whatever we agree on is a developed adult brain).

Lowering the percentage of teens with mental health issues is a good thing.

However that doesn't stop teens from comparing their looks to their peers, adults they know, and obviously global media (magazines, billboards, films, music, etc; what 'successful' women look like on cable news). How are the underlying cause for these negative feelings going to be addressed?

You're never going to get people to not compare themselves with their peers. Comparing yourself through media like magazines etc has been the case for at least 50 years. The teen mental health epidemic has really started in 2012 is what Haidt is talking about.

This. Exposure matters.

Before social media and smartphones came together exposure was infrequent. Now it's nearly constant. It's like the difference between going to a restaurant where smoking is allowed and living with a chain-smoker.

More like 100: my grandmother had skimpy eyebrows that she penciled in her whole adult life because she overplucked them as a teen, trying to look like the movie stars she saw in the rare magazine she could buy in the Dust Bowl-era Texas Panhandle.

Well for one, it would require interest in teen girls that goes beyond "I need a talking point for culture war that I am currently waging".

What culture war specifically?

No one really talks about it but I think it is a symptom of bad parenting. How many times have people sat their kid down and explained these Hollywood types are not the average looking person?

Today, you also have to explain that even the pictures of your friends are not "the average looking person" because almost everything online gets fed through various filters.

When you're exposed to something over and over, you internalize it. Explaining helps with this I'm sure but only slightly.

I'm pretty sure the people suffering are well aware of that. This sort of mental illness isn't the kind of thing thats rooted in logic-brain, and simply "explaining" it doesn't make it go away, else society wouldn't have as much of a problem.

Do you have children? How old are they? Do you actually believe that "sitting your kid down and explaining XXX" to them is likely to cause substantive changes in what are fundamentally deeply non-cognitive takes on the world?

This article is about making people even acknowledge that social media is a or the problem. Acknowledging that one has a problem is the first step. Unfortunately, I don't have a societal solution ready.

> However that doesn't stop teens from comparing their looks to their peers, adults they know, and obviously global media (magazines, billboards, films, music, etc; what 'successful' women look like on cable news). How are the underlying cause for these negative feelings going to be addressed?

Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their peers?

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

So if your peers have a nice fat ass that the boys all like to oggle at while walking between classes and you're stuck with a skinny thigh gapping flapjack white girl tush you bet your ass you're gonna start eating some cheese berders.

The feeling of wanting to fit in is constant for teens. What 'fitting in' looks like changes over time.

What's desired has changed over time in my life alone. Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white women in media shaming themselves and asking if their dress made their ass look fat while also trying to get boob implants.

Nowadays booty is WAAAAY more prominent and desired and those old tired jokes about their ass looking fat a hell of a lot less common.

From the show Brockmire:

https://youtu.be/lOBjS2kzL3w

> What's desired has changed over time in my life alone. Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white women in media shaming themselves and asking if their dress made their ass look fat while also trying to get boob implants.

The "ideal body" is actually healthier now than it was 20 years ago.

But I'm not talking about skinny vs a few curves. I'm talking obese. Clinically obese. As in BMI over 30.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/basics/adult-defining.html

> The "ideal body" is actually healthier now than it was 20 years ago.

So you agree that the 'ideal body' does not necessarily mean it's 'heathier' and because the 'ideal' changes through time.

Girls have been comparing themselves to global superstars as long as there has been photography.

So I guess we should just ban graven images and get it over with. That'll clearly solve everything.

It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.

I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence.

There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality.

Twitter show cases this best, it's prison politics in web form. Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you.

I also agree that this is probably true, but it doesn't mean that his arguments are good.

> Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you

Is this really a modern-tech thing? More like, it's easier and in the open now.

Yes tech does fundamentally change this. Prior to social media, the set of everyone’s gang options was defined by a relatively small geographic area. This means people were largely looking at and likely caring about the same reality, same set of problems, same considerations around the problem, same individuals in mind, etc.

Now you have people forming quasi-religious conviction on issues that are not directly relevant to them whatsoever and looking at completely distinct “data” to inform those opinions.

Elections will continue to get gnarlier and gnarlier because they’re one of the few occasions we need to converge and reconcile our different realities. Between elections, we take refuge in completely distinct information environments than the people who live literally next door. This is completely new. Started with radio, amplified by TV, perfected by internet media.

That's a very good point, social media has made it a LOT easier to invent issues that isn't really issues but just a topic for bullies to rally around.

Yeah... but alternatively you can easily find a group of like minded people. I suppose you could argue this just fractures society more though. People migrate off into groups of others they agree with and don't even bother trying to coexist anymore.

Correct. It’s certainly not without its benefits, but even those have an insidious side.

I think social media amplified trends that were there before. I remember when I came to the US in 2000 it was pretty fashionable to say “I am angry” all the time. And the hatred at politicians was pretty pronounced too. And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups. The internet just made it much worse.

I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.

It's also important to remember that there are specific threat actors in other countries who spend many many millions on polarizing western countries by amplifying the most extreme voices in their online forums.

AI is going to take this to a new level.

I don't think enough people realize this. Or they think it simply isn't common.

> AI is going to take this to a new level.

We truly won't be able to tell the "fake news" from the real.

24 hour cable news, where news became entertainment, definitely sowed the seeds of this.

There is a great movie from the 70s called Network that predicted the slide of society in this direction.

Yes once upon a time 24-hour news meant 25 or 30 different news stories covered in a an our. Now it seems like 5 or less stories in a day, and most of it is panels and "experts" spouting vitriol.

And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.

You're getting down voted, but you're not wrong.

Another factor in parents over protecting kids came from John Walsh. Now, let me preface by saying no parent should endure what his family had to. But he nearly single-handedly caused what we see today where parents get in trouble for letting their kids walk to school or to the park. People today think everyone is a pedo or a child killer because that's what they were fed in the 80s and 90s.

It's a powerful combination of safetyism and concentration in urban and suburban areas that has pushed the American political compass strongly towards collectivistic priorities this generation. Basically a strong "europeisation" in metropolitan America.

Perhaps extortionate real estate prices and telework will put some counterbalance to it, but I don't expect this trend to buckle during my lifetime.

What has this got to do with collectivism? People can collectively decide to do whatever they want. Germany collectively decide to have risky playgrounds for kids. Sweden collectively decided not to lock down hard for covid. It sounds to me like America could do with collectively standing up against these channels and rejecting the rubbish they are peddling.

I don't know that I'd call Germany collectivist. Under your examples by the US having national laws and regulation, we are somehow collectivist, which is not true. It's a trait of society and government.

Collectivist societies are unique in that they punish individuality. The government decides something and everyone must comply or face extra-judicial and potentially judicial consequences.

Individualistic societies often celebrate individuality. It's not marked by the absence of collective decisions, but that there's tolerance to dissent, or even that dissent is given weight and merit philosophically.

I'd summarize this as, collectivist societies are a proxy for government cohesion; it looks like people have power, but they don't. Individualistic societies retain power in both large numbers of people, but also individuals. The government is at competition with it's power to groups of people, which theoretically plays a role in keeping it in check.

That is not why I meant by collectivism. Deciding things collectively just means you have organs of government.

By collectivistic priorities I simply meant that given trade offs between individual and collective orders of priority, the collective takes priority, often at the expense of individual rights.

America has traditionally had classical liberal ideals of individualism, as laid out by Locke, Rousseau and Franklin chiefly, and later others. What we've seen in the last few decades is a stronger alignment with continental European mainstream thought and politics. Perhaps because cities and demographics have pushed things in that direction. But I think safetyism is also a strong component.

I have seen those "risky" playgrounds in Germany - they aren't that risky at all?

Sure, you could get a splinter from the wood if its not maintained, or have a fall and get scraped up, but the risks are low, the benefits (learning to not be a fucking muppet, learning to cope with falls) are high.

The definition of collectivism you are using is incorrect.

> And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist.

I fear the same pattern repeating with Patreon-powered journalism and Substack.

It is definitely happening. I used to like people like Taibbi and Greenwald but I feel that they have cranked up the outrage over the last years to the point that I can't listen to them anymore.

If anyone has ever heard, "I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!", this is the movie that originated from.

When I was growing up, every weekday there was 30 minutes of local news and 30 minutes of national news. Most of the time they were able to fill all of that time with actual newsworthy stories, sometimes, there was filler.

Once the 24 hour news stations came out, there is still 30 minutes of national news, but much, much more filler. This is mostly fear peddling. 40 years of that and it's no wonder the entire population is a little off.

It's like a societal autoimmune disease - when there's not a real, immediate event to react to, something has to be found to fill the airtime that is compelling enough to keep people watching and reacting, and social media has the added "benefit" of finding that filler algorithmically.

This is a brilliant comparison.

> social media has the added "benefit" of finding that filler algorithmically

Algorithmically, tailored per-user and without any oversight.

Traditional media can't peddle too extreme viewpoints because that would alienate a large chunk of their target market. Social media on the other hand can tailor the content for each individual user as to achieve maximum engagement without the risk of alienating anyone.

Traditional media is also subject to oversight (some people - or government watchdogs - can just record the TV programme as evidence) and regulations targeting broadcast media, where as social media isn't since nobody can monitor every individual user's feed, nor do they have the same regulations governing them (Fox got in trouble for peddling election misinformation, Facebook can promote exactly the same content and get away with it thanks to Section 230).

I think that when people are angry, they are more open to suggestion if you do it right. So this is a way to make people more receptive to buying a particular product or subscription, or to supporting a political cause, etc., if you don't make them angry about something first and do nothing else different, you get less conversions. And of all the different ways to improve in this kind of metric, the make-people-angry method one is relatively easy and requires relatively less competence.

Yeah the 24/7 news cycle was definitely a precursor for this. There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time so they resort to sensationalism and drudging up anger wherever they can.

Now, that 24/7 news cycle gets carried around in your pocket daily and you get to see other people commenting on it.

> There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time

There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy things to cover. The problem is that there are limited resources for coverage. It's expensive to staff a desk full of people who can find interesting topics and tell good stories about them for every subject area under the sun. It takes a lot of people with very variegated kinds of subject matter expertise.

It's much cheaper to have 4 or 5 people whose main skills are theater criticism level analysis of political events (i.e. how does this play with various demographics) and a skill of manipulating emotions to spend all their time speculating over nonsense instead. Just put them in a suit and have somber music on and we can pretend this is a serious matter instead of idle gossip.

"There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy things to cover."

Not when it also needs to be "entertaining". When you watch Fox, CNN and others they convey almost zero information about actual issues but only emotion and opinion.

What makes something entertaining or not isn't necessarily a property of the topic. I think you just need an expert who is a good communicator and really enthusiastic about the thing to help you understand why it's cool or important or interesting. The trouble is there are only so many Carl Sagan level people to go around.

I have a feeling that we're on the way out of it now. People are tired of the anger and the cancelling and the extremes

I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly "all politicians are corrupt". I certainly don't remember people saying "I am angry" all the time. I wonder if this was a coastal thing (e.g., the 'Occupy' movement seemed angry in a way that I couldn't relate to having lived my whole life in the midwest) and social media amplified it and spread it across the country?

I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc). It was no longer "politicians are bad", nor even "the other side's politicians are bad", but increasingly "Americans on the other side are the enemy". And of course, conservatives were slow to adopt social media, so (as I recall) this was mostly liberals and progressives punching at conservatives who were still trying to be more buttoned up and play by the old rules, but as they increasingly came online and encountered the new incivility directed towards them (and the incivilizing force of social media itself acting upon them), I think it caused a lot of latent anger to accumulate until they finally embraced incivility in the form of Donald Trump (to be clear, this is a very abridged version of a very complex topic).

> I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.

My hope is that the next generation will see the pointless harm caused by our hate/rage addiction and reject it, and maybe even regard it like an addictive substance (perhaps encouraging people to avoid social media, set up resources for addicted people, regulate social media companies, etc).

"I mean, there was anger at politicians, but it was mostly "all politicians are corrupt"."

I lived in VA at the time and I remember plenty of people who got instantly mad when they just heard the word "Clinton" or "Bush". Since then it just got worse with "Obama=Muslim" and even worse with "Trump".

> I do recall online discourse being a lot angrier and less civil (not merely "more critical", but a lot more personal attacks, hateful generalizations, caricatures, etc).

Tangentially related: I wonder how Usenet groups or 1990s/early 2000s mailing lists compare to today's social media in terms of toxicity. Seems like the "netiquette" mostly worked those days; then again, one can probably easily spot ridiculous trolling or bullying in list archives as well (I like old mailing lists, so I think I have seen many remarkable rants over the years -- to the point that they have seemed conceptually interesting, a peculiar form of utterly irresponsible postmodernist stream-of-conciousness-literature if you will).

The nature of e-mail -- free-form composition, often resulting in lengthy, thoroughly argued replies -- probably did keep some of the anger and emotional arguments at bay, though. Could be that 1990s/2000s hackers were also more eloquent people, but this feels like more of a myth.

Hypothesis: if most online environments would still encourage barebones free-form composition (like e-mail; social media pushes one toward tight and thus sometimes overly straightforward expressions [1]), we would possibly notice more high-quality writing and wordsmiths in the internet. (Proof: go read the lengthy posts of your favorite HN commenter.)

1: See Uni of Chicago-Illinois communications researcher Zizi Papacharissi's work on "affective storytelling". An 2015 article with 250+ citations, analysing Twitter coverage during the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and online iterations of the Occupy movement: https://zizi.people.uic.edu/Site/Research_files/Papacharissi...

Toxicity isn't the only factor. USENET[0] may have been nasty but that nastiness was also very public and untargeted. Social media adds the ability to be extremely targeted with your abuse in ways that are nearly invisible to those who aren't clued into it. You can weaponize it way easier than you can a message board.

[0] And, for the purpose of this discussion, imageboards and other forums with little moderation, such as 2channel, Futaba, 4chan, etc.

> And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups.

I'd posit it goes even further back to shortwave radio. Cable TV, internet forums, and later social media made discoverability easier - but the mass-media bile wa already present for a very long time.

This phenomenon social media is tapping into is far older than cable news. Tent revival preachers tapping into xenophobia and hate on supposed moral grounds date back well over 100 years. I'd expect you have similar feverish preaching by some charismatic leaders who don't believe a lick of their own creed their sheep flock to since we first had enough language to actually think in these terms. Good luck finding a counter for something that seems to be wired into our nature.

That was adults though.

We've had angry politics in the USA for adults as long as I can remember (Morton Downey Jr was my first real exposure to it).

That doesn't explain what is going on with teenage girls though that started around 2012.

> And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups

And let's not forget AM radio.

Twitter really is the worst. At least the other platforms have some good mixed in with the bad. It is nice to stay vaguely connected to people in a sort-of holiday card way.

Twitter has nothing to redeem it. Even in communities where there’s attempts at substantive conversation the medium makes a horrible mess to follow.

I think it depends on who you follow (which filter bubble you are in). Try unfollowing everyone who is not an actual personal friend (or use a pinned list to see only their tweets).

I have Facebook and Instagram for that, depending on the age of the friend.

On Twitter these same people are much more likely to post a hot take than pictures of their kids or pets. The platform draws out toxicity even in otherwise easygoing people.

The Meta products are more beholden to their demographics, unlike Twitter.

Most of my family and friends stopped using Facebook around 2015, and Instagram is predominantly for young people, vain people, or photographers.

Not sure why you're ignoring the various official and unofficial accounts which use Twitter to distribute information during natural disasters which has saved lives, in a way that RSS can't replicate.

Fair point.

Nah, LinkedIn takes the cake in that regard. If you wanna feel full on narcissism and a bunch of meaningless fake posts with people trying appear as something they're not... LinkedIn is the place to be.

LinkedIn and Nextdoor are the two worst social platforms around, it's the worst kind of horrible, a sort of superficial rage and invasiveness, a complete disregard for others as human beings.

Say what you will about Twitter, but at least the insults there are direct and tend to stay exclusive to Twitter - as opposed to neighbors convincing each other of the worst or your ability to land a job being sabotaged because your profile doesn't have enough keywords.

Yep, at least there are some posts on Twitter that occasionally make me laugh. LinkedIn just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and you almost have to use it nowadays.

That's not even remotely true (re: the need to use LinkedIn). Just quit.

It's not remotely true??? You're just off-base with that statement. A ton of companies look there and recruit through that site. Yeah you don't HAVE to use it but you're putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don't.

it honestly never occurred to me that there is a “usage” of linkedin other than putting up a profile to field offers from recruiters

Linkedin is the only social media which has ever been of any tangible benefit to me, though. It makes getting jobs trivially easy, and I only have to login once every few years.

This almost makes it worse. It's like you're expected to use it to get a job now.

Yeah. Its not social media - its media in general

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground

There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the middle.

And that, sadly, is not new, either, as Matthew Shepard demonstrated so memorably in my own lifetime, but things are rather coming to a head now that sexual and gender minorities are forcing their longstanding plight into the public eye. They don't die quite as quietly now, in other words, and the great mass of people is more sympathetic to them now than it ever has been in the past. This, naturally, makes their would-be killers feel a bit persecuted.

> and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality.

Here we go, right on cue. The notion of being run out of employment for holding the traditional bigotries is a bit new, isn't it?

> There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the middle.

You can start by pulling back from the obvious rhetorical flourishes. We can acknowledge that social liberals aren’t literally child molesters. At the same time, can you acknowledge that parents in Florida don’t want to put anyone to death, but simply don’t trust what liberal teachers will tell their kids about sexuality?

Like is it possible for you to acknowledge that folks in Florida don’t want to kill sexual minorities, but are also wary of a resurgent sexual revolution that could change the behaviors of kids who aren’t born gay or trans? Like can you seriously deny that there is an emerging trend of sexual identity becoming a form of self expression? https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/health/pronouns-guide-for-par...

It’s instructive to note that society did reach a broadly acceptable middle ground when it came to same-sex marriage. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the science was not well established, radicals wanted to use same sex relationships as a vehicle to deconstruct social norms around gender and marriage more broadly. The shift in the 1990s to refocus on same sex marriage was a deliberate, and in liberal circles controversial change: https://www.salon.com/1998/11/30/cov_30int. And of course that’s the view that won. Obergefell is a paean to traditional marriage that bears little resemblance to how radical academics conceived of sexual orientation either then or now.

Some major headlines in Florida recently:

  "Florida Republicans Take Aim at Gender-Affirming Care, Drag Shows... [The bill] would treat parents as abusers for allowing medical care to children, and cracks down on parenting harder even than Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s notorious anti-trans child executive order." [1]

  "Florida lawmakers approve death penalty in child rapes, sending bill to governor... The Florida Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would allow the death penalty for people who commit sexual batteries on children under age 12, sending the issue to Gov. Ron DeSantis." [2]

  "Florida to allow death penalty with 8-4 jury vote instead of unanimously... If the Republican governor signs the bill into law, Florida prosecutors trying capital felony cases would need to convince only two-thirds of the 12-member jury that someone who is convicted deserves the death penalty, rather than a unanimous decision by a jury." [3]

I'm sorry, but we are able to connect dots. DeSantis looks like a fascist to many of us outside looking in. I mean, you couldn't be more transparent about building a legal framework for the state-sponsored execution of LGBTQ people. They're doing it right out in the open, and you're telling us that we should just maybe consider that the parents are concerned about what the liberals are teaching their kids about sex. Well then why are they busy passing laws making it easier to put LGBTQ people to death? You can make sure your kids are taught whatever you want without making the death penalty a 8/4 decision. You can do that without making being trans or providing trans healthcare a capital offence.

This is just like the Dobbs decision. When that landed, you had assured us it was a great thing because it meant the states could finally decide once and for all their local norms based on local politics. Well here we are now and there's a nationwide ban on abortion medicine because of an ideologue federal judge with a religious bent, writing laws from the bench, who decided he didn't like it, so we all have to abide by that. People who live in communities that support these medications will be affected, and we were assured by conservatives on the court (and their supporters) that this situation would not come to pass.

So really, I can't stand any more predications about what restraint the right will use with these laws. Any loophole in there will be used as such. Omissions and vague language aren't an oversight in lawmaking, they are tools which allow for the unequal enforcement of those laws in whatever way the executive (Ron DeSantis) prefers.

We cannot give Florida the benefit of the doubt that they aren't currently laying the edifices for genocide because a man like Ron DeSantis would never aspire to exact that kind of revenge on his enemies. Please. The man oozes petty authoritarianism. He is a walking narcissistic injury, and he's proven (though his Disney debacle) he is willing to use his power and his office to exact personal revenge against political opponents. He's not fooling anyone, and any calls to "please let's all give everyone the benefit of the doubt" doesn't pass the laugh test when he's lowering the threshold for the death penalty.

[1] https://www.advocate.com/politics/florida-republicans-transg...

[2] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-nsf-death-p...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/florida-allow-death-penalty...

>Like is it possible for you to acknowledge that folks in Florida don’t want to kill sexual minorities, but are also wary of a resurgent sexual revolution that could change the behaviors of kids who aren’t born gay or trans? Like can you seriously deny that there is an emerging trend of sexual identity becoming a form of self expression?

Sorry, but what's the problem with sexual identity being a form of self expression? Really struggling with this...

A contra-narrative to your point is that there exist a minority of people who hold very specific and very dogmatic views about gender. These people are pushing their views through the education system (I do not know the extent of it, just that it exists), and seemingly without the consent of parents (i.e., social transitions without informing parents).

While I deeply disagree and detest the use of the term "groomer", the people who are doing so, are doing so in reaction to this dogma. Mind you, this is not about sexual minorities, but about infringing on child-parent relationships. As far as I best know (I can be wrong), the dogma is largely unsubstantiated, and it is not majority accepted in most places around the world (look at the UK for instance). Mind you, this is not about trans or gay acceptance, but the rejection of the biological sex binary, the conflation of sex and gender, and the subversion of parent-teacher relationships in favour of this dogma.

Furthermore, I don't think "groomer" is the modern newspeak. If anything, the dogma that the terrible term "groomer" was meant to counter has the support of countless of mainstream institutions, academic, political, medical, news establishments, etc. Unless you live in a pure conservative bubble of any sorts, the dogma is word, the dogma is the newspeak; for starters, painting actual bigots and people who have compassion for these minorities (but refuse to toe the line behind this dogma) with the same brush by calling them "would-be killers". As such, there is a middle ground to be found, a minority of extremists such as yourself just get in the way.

The reaction became a chain reaction and now the details don't matter and the "dogma" could be anything. For example, singing the sone "Rainbowland" at an elementary school concert is now considered pushing some dogma of shaming on kids.

> These people are pushing their views through the education system (I do not know the extent of it, just that it exists), and seemingly without the consent of parents (i.e., social transitions without informing parents).

That's certainly a narrative one side sells. One does have to wonder though, how it is that this could be possible given the complete lack of power in society held by those individuals. Maybe it's a bit more hyped up than it really is.

> A contra-narrative to your point is that there exist a minority of people who hold very specific and very dogmatic views about gender.

Yes. They're the ones who try to enforce their views at gunpoint.

You were going so well until the end, there. They don't enable social transition without parental consent, they insist upon genital inspections without parental consent. Looking at the genitals of pre-pubescent children isn't something which would interest me, but they seem quite keen on it. It isn't something I can condone, of course, and not something I can meet them halfway on.

> While I deeply disagree and detest the use of the term "groomer", the people who are doing so, are doing so in reaction to this dogma.

Insisting on access to the genitals of children is grooming behavior. Normalizing the idea that strangers get to poke around without consent is pure grooming. It's why I can't accept it.

> There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace.

A big part of the problem, though, is that the extremist voices/views get amplified the loudest, and then get trotted out as a typical example of the "other" side. And thanks to modern communication, you can always find bizarre extremist voices to amplify, so it leads to this narrative that the extremist view is held by vast numbers of people when in reality the percentage of people who hold those views is effectively 0.

Sadly "effectively 0" includes a number of mass shooters.

Sorry, can you elaborate on your point a little bit - I'm not sure where you're going but genuinely want to understand.

Even if effectively 0% of people hold extremist views (and I think that is a low number), they also commit outsized acts of violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Springs_nightclub_sho... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting

You'll also note that mainstream conservatives refused to condemn the Colorado Springs shooting and there has been no change in the rhetoric that encouraged it.

> Even if effectively 0% of people hold extremist views (and I think that is a low number), they also commit outsized acts of violence.

Sure, that's true. But it's always been true and, AFAICT, will always be true. But they are such a tiny number of the total population that they aren't the gatekeepers to progress on big social issues.

There is a tendency today to give people like that the spotlight and to paint everyone the slightest bit on the other side as being of the same ilk. Both of these things are mistakes that give those extremists power they couldn't otherwise get.

Backing up, the context here is the notion of finding some middle or common ground instead of splitting into warring tribes. When we fall into the trap of believing that the other side is full of people that look like the extremists on the other side, it eliminates the possibility of there being a middle ground. The result is a deeper divide, utter despair, a lack of progress on resolving issues, and often more people moving to the extremes.

OTOH, when we recognize that the extremists are in fact extremists (i.e. statistical outliers), it's empowering and hopeful. The distance between your views and those of the vast majority of people on the other side is actually much shorter than the distance between your views and those of their extremists (and even likely shorter than the distance between their views and the views of their extremists). It really is a bell curve; don't buy into the lie that it's an inverted one. There is an abundance of potential allies (including the main ones that have a real shot of deradicalizing some of those extremists), most of those other guys are pretty decent people, and real progress is plausible.

Again, there is not middle ground between existence and extermination.

> Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you.

Don't you have to be sufficiently active or prominent on the social media to be attacked?

(Yes, I remember the example of some hapless lady who tweeted "hope I won't get aids" before departing to Africa. I don't know how active she had been on twitter, or how typical the subsequent annihilation of her is.)

Definitely not, if you reply to a sufficiently famous person in a way they dislike there's always a risk they'll (in)directly turn their followers against you.

I mean... this would happen in any place where you get to sound off against someone famous. Right?

Nope - look at the central park bird watcher/dog incident or the SA aids lady as you mention - both of them I guess had a social media presence, but it was along the lines of 50 followers, probably just the people they were friends with in real life.

But also being in a gang doesn't even protect you. Lots of intragang cancellations, if the gang seems you to hold the wrong values for the gang. Eg Lena dunham

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground

I disagree that this is a new phenomenon per se. There’s always been resistance to some aspects of a middle ground. Consider the case of Anita Bryant, who advocated that not being allowed to discriminate against homosexuals was a violation of her rights as a mother and as a “normal” American. She advocated for homosexuals to be ousted from schools and other environments because in her mind being gay was a corrupting force on children. This was well before the internet.

I also think the concept of cancellation is curious because it’s so fickle and stochastic. On one hand the lady who called the cops on a black man filming her choking her dog still doesn’t have a job 3 years later. On the other hand known sexual harasser comedians are selling out tickets like nothing happened. Hard to square that circle, and I wonder if there are more studies to quantify this phenomenon.

Oddly, I used to have the same view of sports. Growing up where I did, it was common for folks to be fanatical on their local college sports team. Such that they get mean to folks from their "rival" schools and are generally trash talking to everyone else. It was so bad, that I certainly thought that was how you were supposed to be. Pick a side and be aggressive to the opponents when watching the game. Goal was to make them do worse, so that your team would do better. It even makes sense in that regard.

However, that is ridiculously unhealthy. And it easily bleeds into other aspects of life. Heaven help you when you go watch some middle school team sometime, parents are being terrible to their kids. Worse to other's kids.

Does this mean sports are unhealthy, though? I'm convinced, right now, that that is definitely not the case. But I can also easily claim we tend to have unhealthy relationships with these topics.

Note that in your example, it's not the athletes that are being toxic (usually), it's the spectators.

It's common for sports fans to say things like, "we're playing Los Angeles next week" or "we picked up so-and-so in the draft" when there's really no "we" about it. The speaker is not involved in the action in any way other than as one observing it. But using that language makes them feel included in something bigger. And sometimes the brain starts to believe you really ARE part of that bigger thing, and you start taking actions to reinforce that belief.

(And I want it noted that I'm very much including myself in this assessment. This is not some "nerds > jocks" kind of thing. As an American football fan myself, I've made a conscious effort to stop saying "we" specifically because this has started to bother me.)

So no, participating in sports isn't unhealthy. Succumbing to the delusion of participation as a spectator, that's what becomes unhealthy.

Ish. Trash talking is a huge thing in sports. Similarly many prudish administrators go out of their way to punish the players for celebrations and such.

Edit: And I'm curious how this relates to the topic at hand. Not that I think it is unrelated, but specifically how. We seem to be in rather strong agreement that it is the relationship with a thing that is unhealthy, with regards to sports. Why or how would that be different with regards to social media?

The connection I see is something like "imaginary tribalism". The members of an audience form a one-sided sense of belonging that distorts their behaviors.

The mechanism seems to be the "media" part. All the promotional content is blasted out at scale in a way that triggers this false or amplified sense of social engagement. It's not the social part of social media that hurts, so much as the media platform part that enables so many promoters to thrive.

How much is an amplified sense of authority? It isn't just that there are promoters, but many of these promoters really dig into the ideas that they have the answers.

This leans into all media and aligns with how much credence is given to pundits. People with good ideas wind up digging in and pushing that they have the only reasonable idea.

The general mechanism is always the same : in-group vs out-group. My tribe is humane, your tribe is evil beyond compare.

The exploit is emotional reactivity, get your in-group gaslighted so they are on permanent rage.

Interestingly, I don't think that is "correct" use of gaslighted. It sounds right metaphorically, as you are "igniting" them in a way that "lighting a gas source" would go. However, gaslighting is to sow doubt and confusion in people's self thoughts. I /think/ you could use this to the same end, but I think the initial was specifically not evoking a sense a rage, but one of dependence.

Yeah, you are right. I think the mechanism, to start an outrage vs the perceived outgroup is indeed the same. Once ignited lots of people don’t change their stance, unless you score high on self-reflection perhaps.

Most sports reduce discrimination and division, I think.

Side-tracking people into unimportant (sports) in-group versus out-group is really good at improving cohesion between important group differences. For example a Mexican and an American rooting for the same team, so they have their sport in common, which helps them be closer to each other.

Sports can be divisive between countries. Then again it is interesting to watch New Zealand support Australians against the English (background - there is usually strong sports rivalry between NZ and Oz since we are neighbours). A bit of win and lose on that one.

The most popular sports tend to be cross-class too - which is good. Of course there are sports that tend to be class oriented in some countries e.g. polo, soccer, athletics. FYI golf and skiing are not particularly class oriented within New Zealand: even 30 foot yacht racing can have a mixture of millionaires, factory workers, professionals and petrol attendants (we are weird down here).

Just a theory of mine.

I'm still mostly inline that anything that gets people engaging together will increase their willingness to do so. If that is playing a sport, that works.

I'm less enthusiastic about a lot of the big corporate push into many sports. Not just at large, but in the reach out to youth. Happy for my kids to get involved with sports at the local level. Annoyed at how much effort seems to go into funneling local assets into marketing that larger organizations clearly could be getting elsewise.

That said, I'm almost socialist enough to have a crap ton of completely incoherent ideas about how those that are succeeding should be doing their best to make sure those that aren't could. With no obligations attached.

How is twitter a prison. You can just not use it. I've never had an account there, and never used it other occcasionally reading a linked tweet in my web browser.

So if social media is toxic for mental health, why am I immune? What’s special about me?

> I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.

The social media business is definitely a toxic, failed replacement for social discourse.

Perhaps young citizens are driven to despair by this and their distress is an early indicator that we are failing as a society to provide adequate education and humanity.

As an adult citizen, I am almost driven to despair.

Consumer enclaves do not replace community.

I just want to say this was one of the most enjoyable articles I have read in a long time. It's informative, respectful to critics, and exudes a "confident but restrained" tone that is so rare in public discourse these days.

His books The Righteous Mind, and Happiness Hypothesis are similarly well written. He narrates the former himself in the Audible version.

We must have read different articles. What I read amount to special pleading where the author confuses scientific and judicial epistemology, doesn't do a literature review, and comes cross as hopelessly naive.

Jonathan Haidt is one of those psychology "gurus" like Jordan Peterson. You're right to read his stuff with an enormous amount of skepticism.

It sounds like you just connected two people you personally disagree with who are otherwise really nothing alike. Why don't you expand?

Yeah it needs a proper takedown. Haidt is respectful but his arguments are pseudo-scientific.

>So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter. The question for readers — and particularly parents, school administrators, and legislators — is which side you should listen to as you think about what policies to adopt or change.

I've been reading all the essays, and the meta-commentary is that the reason the debate reads the way it does is that it's ... not on social media.

I wonder how much of the negative aspects of social media are due to the gamification of it as well as the algorithms that boost certain types of content.

For example, if Twitter had no algorithm, didn't show you the number of views on your post, didn't show you the number of likes on your posts or retweets, and you just used it to post funny memes, interesting articles, and life updates to your followers if it would still have the same negative impacts that it does today.

I also wonder what a social media site would look like if the only way to follow someone, was if they gave you a QR code that was generated on their phone. That way most of the people that followed you would only be people you've met in real life. The QR code could expire in like 5 minutes to prevent people from just posting it somewhere to get follows. It would be much more private, and much slower paced, and people couldn't see any of your posts without following you.

>QR code that was generated on their phone

this gets brought up a lot, often paired with GPS/other sensor matching and with a flavor of PGP-first thinking, web of trust, etc.

The protocol only allows interaction with other people that have swapped keys or been "vouched", depending on the multi-sig requirements baked into the protocol.

With the correct marketing scheme, this could take off, ironically being fueled by FOMO/exclusionary social pressure and meme pressure.

what made the original facebook so great is that it was

1) semi-exclusive (ei. your parents weren't on it)

2) The content you saw on your feed was 100% things that your direct friends manually typed or shared with you. No recommended posts from strangers, no corporate pages, no ads, no games, no articles from groups that you follow to keep up with the local news (eg. HOAs, local politicians, news station), no posts from extended family members that you accepted as friends out of peer pressure, etc.

Trying to grow and become that one-stop-shop for everything the internet has to offer is what ruined it. Having your mom, your 7 yr old cousin and the local shops on the same platform as young adults is more profitable for facebook, but it doesn't make it better for the users.

The only platforms that have kept their reputations over the years are those with leaders that knew how to say no to ideas that compromises the great/unique aspects of the platform in exchange for a larger quarterly profit.

An IRL-only social media site could actually make the problem worse, especially for teen girls.

One common hypothesis for why social media are bad for mental health of teens is that there is no escape. All the terrible things kids do at school (like bullying) now happen 24/7, with little oversight. Forcing people to meet in real life to engage with each other can actually make the problem worse by making it harder for outcasts to find a more supporting network.

I think there is some good stuff that could be described as "Social media", and lots of bad. For example I think all the "influencer" stuff is likely to be problematic, where people show how great their lives are (and by implication how bad yours is).

I think social media like following just your real life actual friends on Twitter / Facebook / having a WhatsApp group is a very different thing.

I think that many videos on YouTube are no different or better than normal TV. Things like creators teaching their skills, or Numberphile.

I'm worried that by saying "Social media is bad" we will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What about monitoring variable levels of social media consumption with the individual levels of depression / anxiety.

I have periods of higher and lower social media usage. And I have noticed that there is a strong inverse correlation with my mental health.

My personal experience is just anecdotal evidence but a study with time variation may eliminate a lot of individual factors ( e.g people with depressing nature using more social media) but leave open the question if depression causes the increase of social media or is there other way around. ( I think thant both)

Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell".

Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?

Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either.

Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation.

In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.

This is an excellent point; it’s hard to square Haidt’s precious claims with coddling unless we’re to accept some kind of convoluted “whiplash” argument: children who are first coddled are then “shocked” with social media. But this requires a generational or chronological explanation that isn’t evidenced: we’d expect to see suicide rates level off with more recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who’ve been on the Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by Haidt doesn’t show this.

The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.

You’ll have to be more specific. What political goals do you think are being accomplished here?

For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings don’t align with YOUR politics doesn’t make the research itself politically motivated, it’s more likely your worldview was politically steeped from the beginning.

I mean in general; I assume you're aware of the jokes on how ancient complaints about the newer generations being weak, disrespectful et. are.

I don't see how Haidt identifying as a centrist has any bearing on anything; the idea that "centrism" is apolitical is also untenable.

I think that's a pretty shaky place to build your foundation. If past generations have been wrong about the younger generation, does that mean we're doomed to be wrong forever? It's nice to imagine that every generation will be a total improvement over the last, but I don't think that's an axiom I can get behind.

As far as centrism goes, you're totally right, it's a political ideology like all the others. What I was trying to point out though is that despite being a very vocal American social critic, he's staunchly deciding _not_ to take a public position on American politics. Despite this, I've seen people on either side of the aisle still accuse him of shilling for the other side, a take I've found super exhausting. I'm not in total endorsement of all of Haidt's research or methodologies, but I do think he's operating from a place of scientific earnestness and honesty. Framing him as politically motivated is inaccurate.

Being centrist IS a political position. The one that status quo is good and those who challenge it are doing something inherently wrong.

Wait, what? Centrism makes it easier to propose changes to the status quo, because most effective and feasible improvements to the status quo are essentially orthogonal wrt. the whole left vs. right political spectrum.

The most effective improvements are frequently a disjoint set relative to the most feasible ones.

Centrism focuses on feasibility, and on incrementalism. The possibility that We're Just Doing It Wrong isn't a part of that worldview, and so should it turn out that we are, in fact, doing it wrong, centrism will never address it.

Put differently, centrism is philosophically equivalent to a local minimum/maximum from which any significant change makes things worse than the status quo (and legitimately so). This metric fails to note that there are better minima/maxima that are reachable, but only if things get worse for (hopefully a short) period of time.

First, actual real world political spectrum is not even on the neat left right scale.

Second, the actual role centrist do is to actively work against improvements. They do not say "I think it is infeasible, but good luck". They say "trying to do this is wrong".

I don't think centrism means believing the status quo is good. Good and bad are on a different axis from left to right. A centrist can believe in a great need for improvement that doesn't involve raising or lowering taxes, expanding or reducing government budget, etc. Corruption and regulatory capture and bad foreign policy and such aren't things solved by moving left or right, generally.

Am I the only one that have the feeling of seeing the ridiculous argument more and more often: "We should not dismiss scientific research just because the findings don't align with YOUR politics and accuse the scientist to be obviously politically motivated. This researcher that produced findings that align with MY politics has been criticized by scientists whose finding don't align with MY politics, so I'm not hesitating of accusing these scientists to be obviously politically motivated".

Yes, I'm sure such easy accusations exist. Not long ago, climate change was "left-wing", and now that we know that it's just science, people should remember who often scientists that were just doing their job were dismissed for being left-wing.

But on the other hand, on the left and the right, scientists are human and are biased by their understanding of how the world works and should work.

For Haidt, I don't have a specific opinion yet, but there are few elements that make me think that, even if he is not conscious about it himself, he may be politically biased:

1) In a lot of his writing, I never really see him taking bias-control measure seriously. He seems, at the end, despite what he may say sometimes, to consider himself "too smart to be biased", which is not a good thing. Having bias-control measures (aka starting from the hypothesis that maybe my conclusions are biased) is an easy and harmless way to do good science (even CERN is doing it by asking members of the Atlas and CMS collaboration to not exchange on non-published results).

2) The scientific critics are pointing at scientific elements that are legitimate. They are not saying "I don't like these findings, so I will say Haidt is right-wing", they are saying "there is a scientific problem with these findings". The large majority of them don't even say that Haidt is politically motivated. The "politically motivated" is appearing after, when people try to understand why Haidt will prefer some conclusions over others while they both are as scientifically grounded. In particular, I'm far from convinced by his counter-argument. For example, "the map for the territory" argument seems to say "stats is hard, so it's ok to claim we are sure even if stats say we are statistically not sure", or "the pascal's wager" argument seems very political "dropping some left-wing values and reinforcing some right-wing values is just all benefits, because obviously we are better off in a right-wing value society"

3) Scientists that are "neutral" will sometimes find findings that are politically neutral (for example: "I find that butter has an impact on mental health"), sometimes left-wing (for example: "I find that some traditional values have a negative impact on mental health"), sometimes right-wing. But if a neutral scientist is studying different topic and, by chance, always ends up with the findings that corresponds to what a right-wing person would think, this is suspicious. Haidt have worked on different topics, as you say for 11 years, and apparently, his reputation for preferring a conclusion more aligned with moderate right-wing is not due to his last topic, but from the observation that a truly neutral scientist will sometimes align with right-wing, but sometimes with left-wing too.

What political objective is accomplished by not coddling children?

That's the point; children would die otherwise, by the very biological nature of our species.

What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is determining the details of what should be allowed to traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.

> is determining the details of what should be allowed

As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove the boundaries that have been established over the past couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at here that are part of that supposed plan to shape society?

Apparently social media is a step too far but other things that he likes should be common again. He might not even be specifically wrong about some practices being harmful, but the given arguments are weak and incidentally they map to a certain kind of reactionary wishlish.

More generally, the discourse tends to boil down to "I was spanked and I turned out fine!".

I don't think that fairly represents Haidt's position at all.

Yes, there is an inconsistency in his writing regarding why social media specifically is something we should protect children from. But Haidt is not suggesting that a return to a corporal punishment regime, or anything like it, is desirable. His concerns are things like free play, independent movement, negative (not only positive) interactions and so on.

Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?

I think that coddling weakens middle aged social psychologists.

Psychologists are notoriously ridden with mental illness. As they rarely gather enough hard evidence for evidence, if the overall mental state of the population their research turns into complete bullshit.

Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.

Seems perfectly contradictory to me, "We need to shelter our kids from the big bad social media because they are too fragile to handle it"

Right and "We need to shelter our kids from crack cocaine because they are too fragile to handle it" is perfectly contradictory too.

If the person saying that had been previously famous for calling for the legalisation of cannabis, and wrote a whole book about how the war on drugs was misguided and led to terrible outcomes and then never addressed the obvious overlap between the two stances, that would also be strange.

“Anti” coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning.

Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you.

Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back.

Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.

Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point.

It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.

Your model of a nuclear "stable household" is very recent, very untested compared to standard practice during most of human history and societes. Putting is on a pedestal without any quantitative evidence isn't wise.

What do you think it is?

I'm not sure about what you're asking, but taking a guess: I think that it's safer to have children raised by a larger amount of figures (primarily the parents, but also grandparents in a multi-generational household, other relatives if they exist, family friends - this would have been other people in the tribe or village traditionally - etc.).

Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly unsupervised, inexperienced people is fragile and "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.

I think most would agree that more is better than fewer caretakers. This works well when families are located close geographically, but not so much when spread out.

I would also argue, why does the community automatically bear the responsibility for a decision made by two?

They also pay taxes for schools etc. - we're talking about society-wide outcomes. Personally I have no intention of reproducing and even think that a managed but very significant reduction in population would alleviate a lot of issues, but this doesn't mean that I want existing children to be mistreated.

My view of life and society drastically changed for me once kids were in the picture.

With all due respect, Given that you’re on the path to population control and all that’s implied with that, I find it difficult in myself to take what you say seriously.

The issue with humans is that when everyone has the responsibility, no one has the responsibility. The moment those kids are 'raised by a village' or however many participants of the family, it automatically becomes a lot harder unless, somehow, the tribe is much more cohesive and can reinforce effectively the same rules consistently.

<< "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.

I would personally argue that the "traditional roles" seem to help the offspring on several levels, but I didn't see many studies ( as opposed to non-traditional that is ) to that effect.

Assuming you mean nuclear family as having two married parents, and not also that these parents are geographically isolated:

Lots of quantitative evidence that having two committed parents means healthier kids (IQ, emotionally, physically, etc.)

I've answered this in another reply to the same post, please refer to that; that wasn't my point.

> Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt.

Basically, gaslight yourself into believing that other peoples actions are your fault? Sometimes you are in fact a victim of something, no matter how uncomfortable that thought makes Haidt feel.

> Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.

Effectively, be passive. Do not try to improve things.

> A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success.

And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.

<< Effectively, be passive. Do not try to improve things.

This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If anything, parent is saying that staying engaged and not giving up just because an issue came up, is a positive, valuable and, most importantly, not passive at all. In other words, if you can't even deal with the problem you received, how are you even begin to 'improve things' overall? You can't even handle your own circumstance to a reasonable degree.

It is easy to generalize ( see? ) and be cynical.

<< And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.

Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?

Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?

> This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If anything, parent is saying that staying engaged and not giving up just because an issue came up, is a positive, valuable and, most importantly, not passive at all. In other words, if you can't even deal with the problem you received, how are you even begin to 'improve things' overall?

It is not uncharitable interpretation. It is exactly what it means. What the cultures that internalized "can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness" have in common is that they are not trying to improve those things. Often for good reasons - the political system or powers to be prevents improvement. But, what cultures that improve things have in common is that they are not happy about stuff they want to improve.

> Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?

They did not. Societies with "father is the disciplinarian mother is not" thing had larger social issues then us - juvenile criminality, alcoholism, smoking, you name it. Fun fact: it was prevalent in Weimar Republic and they were as disordered as it gets.

> Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?

This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.

Parent statement:

>> And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.

Response:

> Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?

Statement:

<< This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.

Response:

Is it uncharitable though? I maintain it is a valid interpretation.

You explicitly said gender essentialism[1] explains why mothers can't seem to get the same results ( "they are not empowered enough" without actually explaining what would that entail I might add so you may want to expand on it a little ) and I simply followed that thread out of sheer curiosity of your frame of mind and responded with a clear counter which suggests that positive outcomes seem to be common to family units that are not, lets call them 'unstructured'.

<< "completely twisting what I said"

It is possible I am misreading you. What are you saying, exactly?

<< Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.

How so? It seems the few studies that were done support that notion[2]. Granted, it is not enough to simply have two parents. They need to be engaged, stable, have decent income so there are other factors at play, but I will boil it down to something really simple. Raising valuable members of society is hard work ; having kids is not that hard in abstract. It is doubly as hard for one person, because there is no one to share that burden with.

There is also some empirical data suggesting otherwise including amount of parents, who stay in otherwise 'bad' unions for the sake of the children suggesting rather instinctive understanding that it is not exactly a 'one man job'. Now, that is being countered by individualistic nature of US, but that is a separate conversation in itself.

In either case, you may want to expand on your thought process to convince me. Right now I don't really see an argument.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553416/

late edit:

<< But, what cultures that improve things have in common is that they are not happy about stuff they want to improve.

I somehow managed to miss it. Can you elaborate a little further on this? I am genuinely curious about examples of such cultures.

Stop lying. This is what you said:

> which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure,

This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.

<< Stop lying. This is what you said:

Um. First, I would like you to consider the possibility that you are not accurate and maybe a little too hasty in your judgment.

When you look at the post history, you will note that it is GP that used that quote so accusing me of lying is a little much. If that is the case, It is possible that you may be a little too emotional about this issue to see the argument clearly.

<< This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.

I am willing to agree, but I am not certain I can continue this conversation in good faith when you ascribe quotes to me that are not mine.

I never hid that I have opinions; some of those are strong and maybe even controversial in some ways, but I like clear statements. I would like to point out that you chose to respond to neither of my questions and instead attempted to derail this conversation by attempting to point to inconsistency that.. well.. does not exist.

<< It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.

But even assuming all of the above did not happen. The question becomes: so?

> Basically, gaslight yourself…

No, it’s empowerment to make change to improve yourself and not wallow in it. Life’s unfair, everyone has their own circumstances with which to grow from. Unfortunately some have much worse to grow from. But staying stagnant and not taking the first step will keep you in that state.

> Effectively be passive…

Not at all what I mean. You should try to improve things, but during such improvement the work might suck and that’s okay. That’s what people mean when they say something is hard.

> Gender essentialism…

There’s a multitude of studies that show if a feminine and masculine role are not present cohesively in a child’s life, they do not grow up in the best situation.

I never mentioned threat, but there has to be an authoritarian aspect of parenting. You cannot have cookies before bedtime, no matter how loud you’re going to cry. Benevolence is desired, but having both parents be pushovers sets the child up for drastic failure. This does not imply abuse. It’s called socializing a kid.

Single parent households on both sides of the equation are horrible. Yes people persevere, but much of the issues we see in inner city are due to single mothers and men leaving their family or being incarcerated unjustly. No amount of money injected into those communities counters this.

Ignoring part of the problem is ignoring part of the solution.

> I never mentioned threat, but there has to be an authoritarian aspect of parenting. You cannot have cookies before bedtime, no matter how loud you’re going to cry. Benevolence is desired, but having both parents be pushovers sets the child up for drastic failure. This does not imply abuse. It’s called socializing a kid.

And it is, frankly, idiotic to have that authority put on parent who spend least time with the kid. While making parent who spend most time with the kid helpless.

> Single parent households on both sides of the equation are horrible. Yes people persevere, but much of the issues we see in inner city are due to single mothers and men leaving their family or being incarcerated unjustly. No amount of money injected into those communities counters this.

Frankly, bullshit. Single parents households are not universally worst across cultures. And the "being incarcerated unjustly" implies way bigger stress factors in play then just single motherhood.

And for that matter, money being injected into those communities so that you don't have single mothers working two jobs would actually do good. Or so that people are simply not desperate and stressed. Do you even listen to yourself?

You make no sense.

"Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences which form and harden their characters.

You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking about.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

We've had to warn you at least once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537) about breaking the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

As others have explained, there is a middle ground. You won't make people tougher by throwing them to lions, but by creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation.

> creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation.

He literally wrote a book calling for Universities to stop creating "safe spaces".

I think the more people are coddled the more that fairly tame environments look like lions.

When the expected university environment is considered too hostile (considered to be too lion -like) you get safe spaces (more coddling)

Haidt considers safe spaces to be a step too far beyond "don't throw them to the lions". You can disagree with that, but please do understand and represent his position accurately.

It's not inconsistent. Social media feeds distortion, and has no conquerable obstacle. "Toughening up" means facing reasonable challenges - they are not equipped yet to habdle algorithmically designed cocaine.

What's funny is that it's the baby boomer generation that created the concept of giving out participation awards to their kids and overly helicopter parenting them, and then 25, 30 years later complains "all these young people are so coddled and soft and wants recognition for the smallest thing!"

A 'generation' isn't a person, it's a massive slice of population. It would be very bizarre if they all had consistent beliefs.

There's no shortage of boomers who've been ridiculing participation trophies from the day they first became aware of them.

Being exposed to adversity at 1 PM in the classroom is fundamentally different from being exposed to adversity at 11:30 PM laying in bed. One of those is much closer to the ancestral environment the human mind is naturally equipped to deal with.

I don't understand what you mean. The ancestral environment is one in which danger comes at night; that's when the tigers come for you. That's why people are afraid of the dark, why even grown men run up their basement stairs after turning off the lights. Monsters in the dark will nip at your heels; that's what our genes tell us. But in the modern context, a child who's facing real adversity (not monsters under their bed) at night has serious problems with their home-life which they'll be poorly equipped to deal with.

Daytime problems for kids are usually problems with other kids and teachers, but those kinds of problems are much easier for kids to deal with alone. Particularly if their home situation is stable.

Those situations are both so far removed from "the ancestral environment" that it's borderline comical to even mention them in the same sentence as said environment. You may as well say that someone a mile away from you is further from/closer to the sun.

I really wish there were more essays about controversial subjects that would take on the tone and presentation of information in the manner that Jonathan Haidt does it.

He really is an exceptional communicator and (to me at least) appears to be more interested in "the truth" than he is in "being right."

> Similarly, when the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski said “The map is not the territory,” he was reminding us that in science, we make simple abstract models to help us understand complex things, but then we sometimes forget we’ve done the simplification, and we treat the model as if it was reality.

I think this is a very useful criticism for the subject as a whole.

The very term, "social media" is incredibly broad. That doesn't mean it's useless: but we should recognize that it contains a lot of diverse context. If there is a cause of mental illness, what would that look like contextually?

The introduction of smart phones and social media can provide a long list of answers to that question. Which of those answers is more or less significant?

None of this is to say we shouldn't be concerned about the effect that social media and smart phones have on mental health. What's important here is what we choose to do about it.

Do we promote a different type of social platform? Current social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are infamous for promoting unhealthy behavior. What kinds of alternative behavior would be healthy?

Do we encourage parents to limit their childrens' social media time or invade their childrens' privacy? The internet is a significant attack surface for bullying and assault, but is it wise for parents to simply take its place?

Do we encourage parents to take away mobile devices, and reinforce traditional face-to-face social activity? Social with who, and where?

It's abundantly clear that social media and smart phones have caused a significant change in our society. We can do better than blindly react to that change.

I would argue that the most powerful tool of the human mind is objectivity. The more we learn about how social media and smart phones change our society, the better equipped we will be to direct that change to our benefit.

If I just walk around the neighborhood, nearly half the pedestrians are staring at the phone, oblivious to where they're going. Sometimes I have to shout "Hello!" to get them to not run into me. And these are (mostly) adults.

One guess what class of app they're all staring at.

I quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Never got in tiktok or any other social media. Our brains aren't mean to handle so much information at once. We can't parse it. We can't distinguish reality from fiction when we're constantly being told several things at once or youre being told a lie several times a day. I also can't stand that we can't just live our lives without having a company collect data to try and manipulate and / or sell me something. I understand that some people need social media but, if you can do without it...do it.

What about the increase in mental health awareness (including: better education and reducing the stigma) - is being able to detect more cases contributing in a meaningful way to the overall increase?

I'm not sure this would account for the increased number of girls allegedly cutting/poisoning themselves. According to the graph on an older article on his substack, the number of girls admitted to hospital from self-harm has gone up by 48% since 2010. Perhaps some of these cases would have been categorised as accidental in the past (or not even taken to hospital maybe) but all of them?

I see such links in HN to be a very good example of mental illness, if you need research to know social media causes mental illness, then you’re mentally ill (or never used social media). It should be obvious to anyone who used social media for any significant amount of time. Yet social media usage is so normalized, especially in places like HN where people are chronically online, that people just self-rationalize.

I don’t think you should listen to what psychologists say; even with their own studies at least 2 out of 3 times it cannot even be reproduced. Let alone something they didnt design a study for..

As far a common sense goes; social comparison and depression have already very well known links, and social media is purely social comparisons, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think social media might have an effect on depression incidence or severity.

Is Hacker News "Social Media"? I think it probably is. Do we apply the same critique of Social Media to our own relationship with Hacker News?

I thought this statement in the article was particularly worth celebrating:

> So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter.

I wish there were more examples of this kind of discourse for other hot-button issues of the day.

Furthermore, when you zoom in on girls, the relationships are not small: girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less. The common refrain “correlation does not prove causation” is certainly relevant here, but I showed that when you bring in the three other kinds of studies, the case for causation gets quite strong.

I know from long experience that saying "I got this far in the article and I can't be bothered to read the rest" is a good way to get hated on, but give me a freaking break. You have to first ask why those girls are spending more than four hours a day on social media.

The obvious inference is that the girls who spend less than an hour a day on social media have full lives and the ones spending so much time there it's like an unpaid part-time job have vacuous lives and they are trying to fill the void with something that can't do it.

Social media no doubt exacerbates their issues but, no, it doesn't cause them. Their lives are screwed up and excessive use of social media is more like a symptom.

Not everyone who smokes cigarettes gets cancer.

If you take young minds which are stressed and unfulfilled, and give them a device which provides short dopamine bursts at the expense of finding actual fulfillment, you get depression.

If you drink extreme, excessive amounts of water, you die of water poisoning though water is essential for life.

Too much of anything can be bad for you.

Edit: Let me add:

If you take young minds which are stressed and unfulfilled, and (do anything other than fix the problems causing their stress and lack of fulfillment), you get depression.

Should we let preteens buy and drink alcohol at school, under the logic that for some of them, the fun/socializing benefits will outweigh the downsides? While this would be funny for a while, I don't think its a good idea.

No and I cannot for the life of me see where this question grows logically out of things I've said.

To be fair, you did respond to a comment about smoking cigarettes by saying that water can also be bad. I've never actually heard anyone compare the two before. This whole thread is becoming nonsensical.

I was responding to this:

If you take young minds which are stressed and unfulfilled, and give them a device which provides short dopamine bursts at the expense of finding actual fulfillment, you get depression.

If there is a non sequitur, it's you randomly bringing up cigarettes and cancer.

You really should have gotten through the rest of the article, it addresses everything you bring up and more.

I've skimmed his argument and it boils down to "I have a hypothesis explaining this phenomenon and you don't."

It doesn't address anything I've asserted. I can think of several possibilities off the cuff but that's not likely to go good places.

Everything I know about human psychology says "Contrary to popular opinion, family life is much more formative and influential for legal minors than their peer group."

Edit:

I will add that where their peer group is a very strong influence it's because the family has already failed them.

More like "and no one does, we've been searching, by the by if you have a theory drop us a line". If you've got good theories maybe drop them a line?

I don't see how your edit meaningfully moves the dialogue - lets say I agree with you and it is a matter of lucid law that poor parenting is a necessary component for subsequent harm to occur w.r.t social media use - whats your point? Does that mean that no harm is occurring or that it isn't important? Or something else?

it just seems orthogonal to the question at hand

More like "and no one does, we've been searching, by the by if you have a theory drop us a line".

I honestly do not see where it says that. More like "We don't like it that you are dismissing our ideas and we want to argue that it costs little to act on our ideas and we don't like it that you are trying to hold us to such a high level of proof. It's like a criminal trial here, come on, that's not fair. We should be allowed to get policy passed impacting your children with less evidence than that, geez."

No, you shouldn't.

If you've got good theories maybe drop them a line?

That's a complete and total waste of my time for a long list of reasons, starting with I am a former homemaker and people are very comfortable being extremely dismissive of me no matter how much evidence I can point to, no matter how well I argue it, etc. and furthermore my experience has been that lots of people are happy to both blow me off and at the same time steal my ideas and take credit for them.

I will write up something on my low traffic, completely ignored, largely unmonetized blog Raising Future Adults, a phrase that began proliferating in articles and podcast titles and the like after I created the blog and hit the front page of Hacker News* with it and, yet, I still cannot get traction nor engagement etc. And he can then do what all the other jerks on planet Earth do and read it and pretend it was HIS idea and not mention he got it from me -- or, alternately, read it and marshal his arguments why he is still right and kooks like me are wrong and stupid.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009

Why are you writing that way, so diminishing and belittling? They make that argument very plainly and clearly precisely so you can disagree with it in a clear and concise fashion, but your tact here is to rephrase it with an insulting tone.

You seem to be reading in a lot of negative intent from a person who has given people who disagree with him, 'the skeptics', ample platform and what appears to be eminently fair treatment.

Also this is the specific quote I am referring to, I won't fault you for missing it but it is a very clear invitation.

>If you can think of an alternative theory that fits the timing, international reach, and gendered nature of the epidemic as neatly as the SSM theory, please put it in the comments. Zach and I maintain a Google doc that collects such theories, along with studies that support or contradict each theory. While some of them may well be contributing to the changes in the USA, none so far can explain the relatively synchronous international timing.

I can't really account for the rest of your grievances - they don't sound outlandish but I'm not sure what they have to do with TFA which appears to do a great job of citing sources. Unless you are accusing this person in particular of ripping you off? I don't doubt that you could have sparked usage of that phrase but it is hardly a new idea or phrase even. I read your blog post* and there isn't an intersection between any of the ideas in that and in TFA. The phrase itself seems too nebulous to cite? And now that I check it doesnt appear to be in use in TFA at all? Im having a hard time understanding this actually, is your position that people have been failing to cite you and the evidence is that a phrase you used became more popular?

*that was nice, I hope you aren't taking a lack of 'traction and engagement' as a verdict on quality

A. Thank you for quoting the exact point where they say that. I'm very seriously handicapped, including serious eyesight issues. I looked and couldn't find it.

B. I hang out on HN for my own purposes. It's part of how I occupy myself.*

I long ago gave up on being taken seriously here or given any fucking respect. I'm a woman. I'm dirt poor and handicapped and HN is a networking fail for me and I get nothing but shit from people for trying to sort my problems and figure out how to make my life work while other people have no problem making money here, making friends, promoting their work, etc.

I've stopped posting my work here because no one but me ever posts my writing, that piece that made the front page made not one thin dime while everyone tells me "Quit your bitching and get a real job."

I applied for a real job. They took my incomplete application with a decade-old resume seriously because I was so much more qualified than other candidates, then hired someone else who proceeded to steal my ideas and go out of his way to make sure I couldn't earn a living locally though he is literally being paid to help locals like me succeed financially.

I'm a writer by trade. It's something I can do in spite of my handicap.

People on the internet do not want to pay writers for their work. They don't want to tip, support your Patreon, hire you as a freelancer etc. HN has spent years telling me that writing simply doesn't pay and I'm crazy and stupid to think it should while simultaneously bitching about how journalism is going to hell. God forbid you should point out that there might be a connection between their desire for slave labor from writers and the lack of quality writing out there.

C. I really don't feel it is appropriate for you to tell me I can't simply disagree with them in a comment on an online forum and must instead come up with an alternate theory and do their job for them and write them and spoon feed them a better answer or shut up.

Their hypothesis does not hold water. No one is paying me to fix their problems for them and I urgently need more income.

I only continue to write in spite of getting no money and nothing but contempt from people because I remain seriously handicapped and it's part of how I occupy myself though at this point I just wish I had not been born into this shit world where it's apparently not allowed for me to make my life work for some damn reason.

Please kindly walk the fuck away from this stupid, pointless argument where if I respond to the points laid out, I'm somehow wrong and if I don't that will just be taken as evidence I don't have a point.

I have a point. It doesn't matter. No one wants to hear it.

I don't have the right bits between my legs and I don't have the right degrees and blah blah blah, which means being right about something is one of the most offensive things I can possibly do. It might make some well-paid man look like a fool and we can't have that.

Please chalk this up to the lunatic rantings of a pathetic loser with no life and just stop. Because it's really ugly stuff to dismiss me and everything that's happened to me and then act like I should just politely let that dismissal stand unchallenged.

* https://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/07/my-occupation.html

Wrong link. Oops. Updated.

For what it's worth: as a fellow parent and handicapped of sorts - thankfully from a corner of the world with a better social safety net than you seem to "enjoy" over there - I always get tremendous value out of reading your posts. I'm pretty handle-blind on this site, so your name is one of the few that stands out, not only because of your excellent writing style but just as much your against the grain-views that quite frankly helps _a lot_ in keeping my "stupid Americans"-bias in check. Thank you!

If Pascal's wager teaches us anything, it's that we want to start from a maximum-entropy prior and model the process generating the two hypotheses.

If a guy ends up living in a gold palace with Michelangelos on the ceiling if those are the only two hypotheses to consider, that might skew his analysis just a bit.

Hmm, he seems to think that the criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) is equivalent to p<0.05 in the sciences. That is highly dubious. I'm surprised he doesn't know the by-now standard belief that p<0.05 is, itself, a criminal standard of proof (lol).

I've been noticing that I'm much more likely to argue/fight with friends by text rather than in person. Not talking about social media, just plain old chat. Maybe because we miss real-life signals that help us adjusting the conversation.

We need to improve our emotional intelligence by talking about emotions and feelings to become more resilient. We as a society are emotionally immature and let others manipulate us and cede power to them because we are scared of our true selves.

When I see someone taking a selfie at a pool who appears to have had cosmetic surgery, I simultaneously feel pity for and disinterested in knowing them for being slaves to and simulacra for the opinions of others.

I think that blaming 'social media' is kind of misguided. That is mostly passive thing. The real issue is more likely toxic social relations and communication with peers, which is just provided by social media.

the whole insistence on going with what they believe in, 'social apps bad' (and kinda just that, not really going deeper into 'what are the interactions', etc.), just makes this seem kinda off (and gives a 'collaborative confirmation bias' vibe). sure, apps exist, but is it 'apps' or 'people being social'. and they kinda touch on that, but still fall back to 'social media bad' as a clickbait headline. 'it's kinda not about that, but let me engage in clickbait anyway'.

'being on a social app' is a high level / ambiguous enough of a thing, that trying to tie a rise in 'communication availability' and 'people being online' to rises in other things, kinda doesn't connect. (well, not as directly of a 'cause-effect', muddled with all the various ways that 'use'/'online' can be.) sure, it may be 'screen time', 'time spent online', but then just say that, not like it's 'social media being there, at all'

if they want to continue milking that headline, great. i just no longer see 'pointing at social apps and saying social app bad' as interesting, insightful, or valuable, at all. it's saying nothing.

How many of Haidt’s critics have large enough followings on social media that they are familiar with the sweet taste of upvotes?

The map is indeed not the territory. There is an insane amount of people who live in a fantasy world, where they believe that theory equals practise, which is absolute and utter nonsense. They do not understand the value of experience, most likely because they don't actually have any.

1. One can always derive theory from practise, but never the other way around.

2. You might have read every single book about boxing, but that still doesn't make you a boxer.

Couldn’t it be that people become more aware of mental health problems because of social media?

Stop calling it social media, it's anything but social. It's Anti-Social Media, and it is destroying civilization.

Why do people still take this guy seriously

Mental health is an incredibly tricky thing to study. Since all observations are of a person says they feel and what observations can be made of the person and what they may say various semi standard questionnaires.

The first problem is defining what depression is. This is actually hard.

The present official definition can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176119/

A great lecture on it by Professor Robert Sapolsky can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc He does this far far better than I ever can. I include a tiny transcript below.

Even within the medical field the term is used in ways that complicate matters.

We find "Depression, otherwise known as major depressive disorder or clinical depression"

This is incorrect.

In everyday use the term depression is not equal to "clinical depression", or "major depressive disorder"

In regular conversation depression is often used instead of "sad". or "bummed".

If relying on a self-report survey that asks in part if you feel or have felt depression over XXXX timeline a lot of people will say "yes". Yet most will probably not meet the definition of major depressive disorder or clinical depression.

If in everyday speech care was taken to only use depression for sad, and clinical depression was used for the metal disorder then things would be easier but as I showed above even medical professionals tend to use the term "depression".

I think using the term "depression" has become a lot more popular than it was.

50 years ago, using it in common language was so common.

This gets better in the studies when (some) people attend college where (some) people are seen by mental health professionals. However, in my personal knowledge hte above is also primarily self-reported, and not based on the treatment and therapy of the majority of the people in question.

Yet we have a non-representative sample. Only people with privilege to attend high university and of them the people who have sought out help.

So that is the problem of semantics.

A second problem is why If a girl who spends only 1h a day on social media is less prone to "depression" than a girl who spends 8h a day on social media does that mean social media is the big factor.

I find it likely that it wold often be the case that a person with a healthy social life, a good family, good activities, that takes up a lot of time.

While someone who spends 8h on social media per day perhaps needs more positive activities. Which can be incredibly difficult to achieve.

The argument has been made in different forms for a long time. Too much TV, too much rock music, too much video games, too much black metal.

Yet I do think that social media is far too often a destructive component in someone's life. With severity than listening to a vinyl recording all day or playing Quake. I would be quite happy if it all died. It dont see that happening.

Partial transcript of a lecture by Professor Robert Sapolsky "" So starting off, first giving a sense of symptoms. And right off the bat, we’ve got a sematic problem, which is we all use the word depression in an everyday sense. You get some bad news about something. You now have to replace the transmission in your car. Somebody disappoints you enormously. And you feel bummed. You feel depressed. You are down for a few days. That’s not the version of depression I’ll be talking about.

Next version, you do have some sort of large, legitimate loss, setback, whatever, losing a job, unemployment, death of a loved one. And you are extremely impaired by a sense of malaise for weeks afterward. And then you come out the other end. That’s sort of what I’ll be talking about.

But even more so what I’ll focus on is the subset of individuals who, when something like that occurs, falls into this depressive state. And weeks and months later, they still have not come out the other end.

Terminology. The everyday depression that we all have now and then, that sort of version. The second one, the something awful happens and you feel terrible for a while, and then come out the other end, a reactive depression. The third version, where you are flattened by it for long periods afterward, a major depression. And what you also see with people with major depression after a while is it doesn’t take something awful externally to trigger one of those again.

People always say correlation does not equal causation but they never mention how does one determine causation definitively?

Unlike typical observational science, causation must be established by having the experimenter intervene with the experiment himself. The experimenter must introduce or remove smart phones to the population being experimented on and record any changes to the data.

So it's actually very possible for the author to prove his own theory beyond reasonable doubt.

These are the 2 options I can think of that can be done individually or together:

   1. Remove smart phones away from people who are depressed. Measure depression levels over time.

   2. Pick a set of humans that don't use smart phones and choose who will have access to smart phones and who never will over a period of 5 or 10 years. Measure depression levels over time.

We have procedures in place to prove things like this with medicine. I think it's very possible to conduct experiments like this with the rigor of clinical trials given that you can literally remove or introduce the predicted causative agent from any human: smart phones.

It's worth it to mention here that not all things are amenable to causative experiments. I believe in climate change but it is not possible to run a causative experiment where you remove or introduce the causative agent: greenhouse gases. It is unfortunate that climate change cannot be established as true beyond reasonable doubt simply because all current evidence is correlative.

But for smart phones it is very very possible for the author to go far beyond a retort and actually prove his claims correct.

Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?

Which period are you referring to? According to https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-... this is not the case.

There's a hard line drawn on that chart in the year 2012, as if it's some sort of significant outlier in the data, except that it's not. The upward trend in suicides seems to begin in 2007.

That's not why the line was drawn.

> In the rest of this Substack post, I offer a preview of the evidence that a mental illness epidemic emerged around 2012

All of the charts have this line to highlight how the chart relates to the supposed theory of "problems starting in 2012". Not every chart will show anomalies around that time though.

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