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Comment by genrilz | Hacker News Reader

This is a post in a debate between Jonathan Haidt and Candice Odgers. If you look at the meta-analysis cited by both, Haidt cites one which does seem to show a high effect size correlational link between screen time and depression. Odgers cites 4 meta analyses, one of which is actually a meta-meta analysis, which all claim that the effect size on depression and other measures of well-being are small.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Haidt's cited analysis, but it seems like there has been quite a bit of research on the effects of social media, and the majority of the evidence seems to point towards it not causing large well-being problems.

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Since we're all applying our own anecdotes, I can tell you my kids have had unfettered and unregulated screen time pretty much their whole lives on account of I don't really believe Haidt's point of view. They have absolutely zero interest in any social media platform except YouTube which we all frequently watch together.

My son got inspired to cook by watching youtube. My daughter loves Vihart and wants to study math in college. I use Reddit and HN, but no Facebook or Tiktok. We also pretty much all have elevated levels of anxiety and it's all due to things happening in real life. Too much homework, annoying coworkers, annoying neighbors.

And I also observe that my kids and their classmates are just so incredibly good. There is nearly zero bullying. My son got picked on recently and his classmates jumped up and formed a circle around him like heroes. There is zero tolerance amongst even middle-school kids for anti-LGBTQ sentiment that was just basic banter for kids when I was in school. I hear this from a lot of parents. I think Gen Z and Alpha have anxiety because the adults in charge of the world are such worse people than they are.

>I think Gen Z and Alpha have anxiety because the adults in charge of the world are such worse people than they are.

I think this is an interesting insight and I wonder if the anxiety and cynicism is related to a significant miss-match between expectations and reality.

They were sold an bunch of ideals which are essentially maladaptive because the world operates so radically different than how they were told it does/should.

This is similar in concept to how Generation Y erroneously learned from watching TV shows like The Simpsons that a typical middle class lifestyle includes owning a 2,000 ft house, which was never the case. When the "promised" good never arrive, people are naturally outraged, angry, or jaded.

If Gen Z and A are taught that for the world to be good, it must be a place of peace an justice, their teachers have burdened them with a Sisyphean task, and doomed them to living miserably in an evil world.

I place the blame on the idealism and absolutism of earlier generations, which rejected realism, incrementalism, and compromise. In my opinion, to find happiness, people need to be able to come to terms with world as it is, and then accept that they can only incrementally improve it.

I know I would be anxious, depressed, and neurotic if I was told that the world was broken and evil, and it was my responsibility for the impossible task of fixing everything.

"the majority of the evidence seems to point towards it not causing large well-being problems."

I can't see how this is true. Anecdotally, everyone I talk to, and you most comments in this thread (and any other thread) is full of people admitting that they A. use their phone too much B. wish they didn't and C. it makes them feel bad. Again, n of 1, but I've never met someone that openly wants to use their phone more or will say that social media has been great for them.

Admittedly I haven't read the research, but how does it come to the conclusion that social media isn't causing problems?

This article's threads are also filled with people talking about being on their phone too much and wishing they/other people weren't.

It's all self declared though, the same way people will complain they don't exercice enough, they don't eat enough vegetable, they don't read enough books, they didn't stick to their new year's resolution etc.

We can't take people's guilt or self loathing as an indicator of an actual critical problem.

There is a difference you neglected: nobody optimizes our society to eat less vegetables, or read less books, or to disregard new year's resolutions, so the responsibility is on us, whereas social media platforms do optimize for engagement, which implies showing us sensational and shallow content that grabs our attention, without giving us enough ways to control it, so responsibility is divided...

> nobody optimizes our society to eat less vegetables, or read less books, or to disregard new year's resolutions

Disclaimer: I have no hourse in these races.

There's absolutely whole industries dedicated to make you eat juicy meat as the main dish and making sure it stays so for the foreseeable future.

Our media landscape is a zero sum attention market, we only have 24h in a day and you can check Netflix CEO interviews, he's painfuly aware the battle is against any other form of entertainment.

And yes, you going to the gym doesn't help Netflix or Nintendo or Epic. If they find a lever to cut it down, they'll totally do it.

On social media it's the same playing field: giving companies full freedom to do whatever they want at scale has always been a recipe for disaster. If we want more control we should get it, the same way radio and TV had more control structures in place.

That's not what the author is pushing for though. Except if the definition of "control" is squarely "stop people from using it"

I at least skimmed all of the meta-analyses that both of them cited. It seems like social media has both positive and negative effects on people, and these average out to fairly near zero.

From this, I can make a hypothesis about why you are seeing what you are seeing: Assuming you are in a society which values hard work, (like the US) then the people around you probably think of social media based screen-time as being lazy. Thus they derive some amount of self-loathing from their own social media use, and are more likely to focus on the negative effects and not the positive effects of social media use.

I don't have the data to prove this particular story, but hopefully it at least demonstrates how both the research and your personal experience could be true at the same time.

"social media has both positive and negative effects on people, and these average out to fairly near zero"

Is that the right way to think about it though? Opiates have many positives (medical pain management) and many negatives (drug misuse and overdoses). Do we simply say "the effects average out so there's not a problem"?

I do think it is worth considering how social media effects people at a more granular level. For instance, I think the focus on "engagement" probably makes the negative effects worse, and we would see less negative effects if social media companies weren't optimizing for that.

However, my understanding is that Haidt wants to completely kick kids off of social media. This is a bit different from how we engage with opioids, which are still used for pain management. Opioids only really have positive effects for pain management, and so I think that it is reasonable to keep them regulated. (although I've heard grumbling from doctors about how them trying to be careful about who they give opioids too leaves a lot of people in severe pain) On the other hand, social media's positive effects are things like staying in touch with old friends, building community with people like you when people around you hate you, and learning new skills. I don't think that restricting or eliminating social media use will help here. Instead I hope that people take the design of social media more seriously. (for instance, HN or Mastadon)

EDIT: additionally I'd say that the negatives of unregulated opioids do far outweigh the positives, which is not the case for social media.

Probably that there's an underlying common cause that means the effect disappears when you analyze the data properly. For example, if screen time is caused by lack of parental presence and lack of parental presence is caused by poverty and poverty also causes depression, then a naive analysis would find a correlation but a proper analysis or meta-analysis would subtract out the common causes of poverty and parental absence and find no effect.

Yeah, Haidt's is a compelling entry but sounds too good to be true. I haven't been following this discussion or the studies, but just a quick check of one of the two studies he uses as examples of evidence for harm caused by social media (and benefits of withdrawal) shows that a) he misquoted the protocol (daily usage reduction to 30 minutes instead of by 30 minutes a day) b) the study is hardly conclusive due to major methodological weaknesses (homogeneous sample, self-reporting of both protocol compliance and results).

It's frustrating. Odgers' initial review [0] is clearly inadequate, for all the reasons Haidt outlines in this post: she basically says Haidt has no evidence (simply untrue) and asserts without evidence that youth mental health trends are due to socio-economic problems in the US, when Haidt has long made it clear that the problem is international. Her response either suggests that she's an overly-motivated and sloppy reader/thinker, or outright deliberately dishonest.

On the other hand, Haidt's response is also inadequate, simply because he doesn't really tackle the evidence Odgers cites.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

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