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Screens might be as bad for mental health as potatoes
- linuxlizard 8y agoAs a programmer in Idaho, I breathed a sigh of relief.
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- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoAs a hacker news reader, I laughed out loud.
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- skywhopper 8y ago...overly clever headline meaning "variation in 'screen time' is basically uncorrelated to mental health". Both because "screen time" is poorly defined, and because whatever impact it has is vastly overshadowed by numerous other factors. But studies about "screen time" get attention because the culture has shifted so drastically in the past 10 years.
- _Schizotypy 8y agoThey are saying it is correlated, just as much as the correlation between mental health and potatoes which is next to negligible yet existent
- tapland 8y agoIs it a negative correlation? Because oh I love potatoes.
- rjsw 8y agoIt probably won't help your mental health if someone throws a potato at your head.
- captainbland 8y agoI mean they make me happier.
- kbutler 8y ago> ...yet existent The article does not assert that there is ANY correlation between mental health and potatoes. The closest they come was "about as...which is to say, hardly at all". .001 is about as much as 0, or about as much as -.001. It was a flippant remark, and probably better interpreted as "screen time may be good or bad for your mental health, depending on many other factors, like potatoes may be good or bad for your [mental?] health, depending on many other factors."
- scott_s 8y agoThe article does make that assertion, and it is as an illustration: > The result was a series of visualizations that map the wide gamut of potential effects researchers could detect in the three repositories, and they reveal several important things: One, that small changes in analytical approach can lead to dramatically different findings along that spectrum. Two, that the correlation between technology use and well-being is negative. And three, that this correlation is very, very small, explaining—at most—0.4 percent of the variation in adolescent well-being. > To put it in perspective, the researchers compared the link between technology use and adolescent well-being to that of other factors examined by the large-scale data sets. "Using technology is about as associated with well-being as eating potatoes," Przybylski says. In other words: hardly at all. By the same logic, bullying had an effect size four times greater than screen use. Smoking cigarettes? 18 times. Conversely, getting enough sleep and eating breakfast were positively associated with adolescent well-being at a magnitude 44 and 30 times that of technology use, respectively.
- BerislavLopac 8y agoI think that the effect of potatoes on mental health is sadly underrated.
- jjclarkson 8y agoThe Potato Hack agrees with you https://potatohack.com/ https://potatohack.com/
- kowdermeister 8y agoCorrect, I usually eat potato when I'm out of money.
- debacle 8y agoI'd like to see a study that makes a distinction between "screen time" and "desk/couch time." Not all screen time is created equal.
- duxup 8y agoYeah if I'm coding away, like actually thinking. Or even if my son is (well in scratch) is that the same as watching transformers?
- Dirlewanger 8y agoRight. From a naive perspective, I think it's safe to say that 2 hours of screen time watching a movie with loved ones is better for your health than a cumulative 2 hours of looking at your phone browsing social media and constantly comparing your life to others.
- shahbaby 8y agoclick bait headline
- evmar 8y agoI couldn't quite follow what the article was saying about "anaytical paths", but I think they're talking about spurious correlations. I worked on a stats app. We referred to the problem of finding correlations from data as "the green jelly beans problem" after https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ . There are techniques to deal with it like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction .
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- atesti 8y agoThis page produces tons of spurious correlations: http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations