Jonathan Haidt's claims on kids and tech crumble under scrutiny from top expert | Hacker News Reader

Jonathan Haidt's claims on kids and tech crumble under scrutiny from top expert

techdirt.com

17 pointspaulpauper9 comments

The article references a discussion between pop author Jonathan Haidt and expert on youth mental health Dr. Candice Odgers

    Haidt admits at the very end, is that Odgers knows the research in this space better than anyone, and she wasn’t going to let Haidt get away with making broad generalizations not supported by the data. 

    She also suggests that Haidt’s problem is that he has a story and then went back searching for data to support it. Rather than going in and seeing what the data actually says

    Haidt jumps in to insist you don’t need a pre-existing hypothesis to find something. This is technically true because of course you can sometimes find something that way. But also, it is kind of a big deal right now, given the replication crisis which started in Haidt’s own field of psychology. The crisis was brought on by researchers hunting through data to try to prove something.

    Haidt frequently jumps between arguments that aren’t directly connected. When asked about evidence on mental health, he talks instead about things like sextortion and catfishing. 

    I’m really hoping that more people recognize that Haidt’s position doesn’t seem to really be supported by the evidence.

    Instead, politicians, parents, and school administrators are all acting as though Haidt has it all figured out. Mostly because it absolves them of having to do the hard work of teaching kids how to use these tools appropriately.

>making broad generalizations not supported by the data.

There are psychologists who do not do this.

There are not very many psychologists who do not do this.

I have to wonder about incentives around the existing research though. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars being earned by social media companies and they have a strong incentive to tilt the research in their favor. There’s much less incentive to do the opposite. Anecdotally, the teachers I know seem to agree with Haidt in what they see day to day.

This has happened before. In 1950, the first link between tobacco smoke and cancer was publicized. Tobacco companies took 40 years before they started to admit (and then only due to public pressure) that the link was real and they already knew about it.

Also back then real scientists defended the companies, with so-called real data.

If you don't know who to trust in a case like this, it's always a good idea to pick the side that is against the bottom lines of large companies.

Suppose I'm a Famous Author and I make the bold assertion that preschool-aged children who are sexually abused end up exhibiting degraded STEM skills in high school. And then someone comes along and debunks my assertion.

Guess what? It's STILL better for kids to not be sexually abused! Everyone knows it!

Haidt may have been guilty of some motivated reasoning, but it didn't lead him to a bad place.

Social media is not self-evidently harmful to mental health, that's why Haidt got so much recognition in the first place. If you take his theories away/discredit them, the whole idea crumbles.

>Haidt may have been guilty of some motivated reasoning, but it didn't lead him to a bad place.

Putting the question of whether this analogy is applicable to this case, the underlying attitude is totally toxic. It's not only important to be right, it's important to be right for the right reasons. Otherwise we lose track of what's actually true or not, and discourse succumbs a information cascade, where something is true not because of empirical evidence or anything, but because "it's obviously right, and even if it's wrong, we should pretend it's right because it's for a good cause"

Cope however you want TikTok and Meta employees but all someone needs to do to realize the harm being done to kids and teens by your products is spend any amount of time with them and ask them about their friends and school.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

https://archive.ph/2024.11.10-023132/https://www.wsj.com/art...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com