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

• tokai 3y ago
  Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?
  • YuukiRey 3y ago
    Which period are you referring to? According to https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-suicide https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-... this is not the case.
    • chrisco255 3y ago
      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.
      • YuukiRey 3y ago
        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.
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  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?
  • HopenHeyHi 3y ago
    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.
  • woodruffw 3y ago
    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.
  • frostburg 3y ago
    The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.
    • joenot443 3y ago
      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.
      • frostburg 3y ago
• woodruffw 3y ago
  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.
  • ThomPete 3y ago
    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.
    • etrautmann 3y ago
      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.
      • ThomPete 3y ago
        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.
• FridLV 3y ago
  [flagged]
• thih9 3y ago
  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?
  • DharmaPolice 3y ago
    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?
• knallfrosch 3y ago
  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.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    “But correlation isn’t causation!!””* *causation is impossible to prove outside of STEM
  • iamerroragent 3y ago
    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?
    • somedude895 3y ago
      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.
      • dsfyu404ed 3y ago
        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.
• raxxorraxor 3y ago
  > 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.
  • bigbacaloa 3y ago
    The converse argument is far more plausible.
    • amelius 3y ago
      It's still just guessing. Can we please go from "plausible" to "we studied this"?
      • caddemon 3y ago
        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.
        • whats_a_quasar 3y ago
          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-experiments-using-random-assignment-show-a-causal-effect-of-social-media-use-on-mental-health https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...
• MrYellowP 3y ago
  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.
• psychphysic 3y ago
  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.
  • frostburg 3y ago
    I also agree that this is probably true, but it doesn't mean that his arguments are good.
  • tmikaeld 3y ago
    > 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.
    • badkitty99 3y ago
      [dead]
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      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.
• mold_aid 3y ago
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• ajkjk 3y ago
  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).
• mawadev 3y ago
  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.
  • creshal 3y ago
    > 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.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      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.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • jt2190 3y ago
      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.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  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.
  • throwaway9191aa 3y ago
    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.
    • mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Maybe we give-in with clear boundaries and regular check-ins? Give-in and Check-in support group :)
      • caddemon 3y ago
        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.
    • windowsrookie 3y ago
      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.
• thuridas 3y ago
  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)
• deleted 3y ago
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• tourgen 3y ago
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• 1827162 3y ago
  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.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    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.
    • afthonos 3y ago
      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.
    • lolinder 3y ago
      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.html https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.htm...
• rjmunro 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
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• softwaredoug 3y ago
  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.htm 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?
  • hudsonjr 3y ago
    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.
• freework 3y ago
  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.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    << 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.
    • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      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.
• williamcotton 3y ago
  How many of Haidt’s critics have large enough followings on social media that they are familiar with the sweet taste of upvotes?
• kloch 3y ago
  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.
  • ycombinete 3y ago
    His books The Righteous Mind, and Happiness Hypothesis are similarly well written. He narrates the former himself in the Audible version.
  • kelseyfrog 3y ago
    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.
    • seattle_spring 3y ago
      Jonathan Haidt is one of those psychology "gurus" like Jordan Peterson. You're right to read his stuff with an enormous amount of skepticism.
      • joenot443 3y ago
        It sounds like you just connected two people you personally disagree with who are otherwise really nothing alike. Why don't you expand?
    • revelio 3y ago
      Yeah it needs a proper takedown. Haidt is respectful but his arguments are pseudo-scientific.
  • remarkEon 3y ago
    >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.
• aaron695 3y ago
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• Freire_Herval 3y ago
  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.
• nightowl_games 3y ago
  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?
• RockyMcNuts 3y ago
  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.
• zajio1am 3y ago
  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.
• standardUser 3y ago
  > 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.
  • Deegy 3y ago
    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.
    • caddemon 3y ago
      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).
  • caddemon 3y ago
    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.
• amluto 3y ago
  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.
  • Karellen 3y ago
    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.
    • lukeasrodgers 3y ago
      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.
      • Karellen 3y ago
        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 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.
    • mrbungie 3y ago
      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.
• taeric 3y ago
  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.
  • YuukiRey 3y ago
    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.
    • taeric 3y ago
      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.
• webdoodle 3y ago
  Stop calling it social media, it's anything but social. It's Anti-Social Media, and it is destroying civilization.
• bannedbybros 3y ago
  [dead]
• theGnuMe 3y ago
  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.
• Decabytes 3y ago
  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.
  • Jerrrry 3y ago
    >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.
  • max51 3y ago
    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.
• moi2388 3y ago
  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.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  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.
• Glyptodon 3y ago
  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.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    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.
    • Glyptodon 3y ago
      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."
• 7402 3y ago
  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.
• quantum_mcts 3y ago
  Couldn’t it be that people become more aware of mental health problems because of social media?
• 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  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.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  > 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.
• Wensio 3y ago
  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.
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  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/ 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 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.
• maybelsyrup 3y ago
  Why do people still take this guy seriously
• tanseydavid 3y ago
  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."
• MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  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.
• yodsanklai 3y ago
  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.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  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.
  • zdragnar 3y ago
    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.
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      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.
      • kaibee 3y ago
        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.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• pxoe 3y ago
  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.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  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.