8 ms·

Jonathan Haidt blames teenage depression, anxiety on smartphones, social media

81 points by fortran77 3y ago

RobotToaster 3y ago
Obviously nothing to do with declining living standards and social atomisation. must be the phones.
- grugagag 3y ago
  There are multiple factors at play, phones being one of them.
- unclebucknasty 3y ago
  Social atomization arises from a lack of social connections. Not too far a stretch to see how our device / social media time might contribute to a breakdown in deep social connections.
bluescrn 3y ago
Let them have old Nokias. Calls and texts only. Inexpensive (not a theft magnet), durable, long battery life. No social media (or online gaming even?) until at least 16, if not 18 or 21, seems entirely reasonable given how much it messes with the heads of full-grown adults.
- vundercind 3y ago
  We’re finally about to the point that our kids kinda need something. Payphones don’t exist anymore, after all. We’re planing on a shared Nokia at first, maybe separate ones as they get older. We figure if they want a smartphone, they can have one when they can pay for both the phone and the data line themselves. If they can hold down a part-time job they might be responsible enough for it. If it matters that much to them, they’ll do what they need to get it. If not… guess it wasn’t that important.
  - graeme 3y ago
    A cellular Apple Watch seems like a decent possibility. Has anyone tried this? Has phone, messages, weather, location sharing, ability to google basic stuff. But very, very hard to use compulsively. You can even add things such as instagram apps but they're just not that compelling in a small format.
    - vundercind 3y ago
      Still has to be tied to a phone, right? Or can they operate without ever being connected to a phone, now?
- grugagag 3y ago
  The problem with older phones is an interminable deluge of fake robocalls and soliciting text messages which make them practically unusable. Smart phones can filter these out but come with a different flavors of cancer
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Some carriers offer services that do a pretty good job of filtering these out. You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone.
    - rustcleaner 3y ago
      >You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone. Nope. You get a blacklist as a basic feature, but a whitelist has to be installed (on Android). I use Silence (single Android profile) or Yet Another Call Blocker (multi Android profile) [both on F-Droid]. I add * to the blacklist then set the ignore/skip for numbers in contacts setting. You literally cannot make my phone ring without being added to my contacts. This should have been the standardest of standard features for years, which is just another example of Out To Get You games companies play on retail customers (another example of a set of standard features which should be ubiquitous is the Privacy.com cards: every bank or credit card company should offer the same virtual cards and control features but practically none do: screw you Mr. Customer buy the upgrade/DLC/"Pro edition!").
      - rustcleaner 3y ago
        I'd like to see DMCA rolled back in a way that it is almost legally encouraged to break security systems on products, in order to maximize either more owner control or maximize performance left on the table and is physically there (even in code) but is otherwise locked out in software. In my wet dreams: gone will be the days of one assembly line, one physical object, many grades of product performance dependent on '''licensing''' codes and such. You don't want the customer to have heated seats? Don't ship the heated seats! Don't like that the customer is hacking your software/firmware to enable those features, and sharing the modifications (just the steps to mod, like a diff patch)? Tough cookies mate, actually here's a 20%-of-last-year-gross-revenue fine for anticompetitive and anticustomer sovereignty business practices. Pray we don't seize all assets and liquidate you, next time you try this trick again. Imagine if companies had to treat customers like a defendant has to treat Your Honor in a courtroom, or they get boycotted and fined to bankruptcy... that would be niiice. :^)
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
The CWT episode where Haidt spoke to Tyler on this was one of the more heated ones recently. Recommended, get some popcorn. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...
- adolph 3y ago
  Well worth a listen. Cowen’s dander was up as if he were a regular HN contributor.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Yeah, Tyler normally plays softball with guests, albeit with interesting questions. He really did a lot of pushing back on this one, and it was really interesting to see their different approaches. Haidt really seemed focus on finding common ground with Tyler personally, while Tyler was far more interested in challenging hadiat's position. Ultimately, I felt they were talking about different points. Tyler thought that it was on net positive on average, or at least will be in the global long run. Haidt was talking about worsening outcomes for a subset of the population, and perhaps the average today. My priors lead me to agree with basically both of them in their own domains. I think social media today is increasing harm and dropping the mean outcome, but also increasing the performance for children who successfully navigate it. I think long-term, culture will evolve to develop better habits around social media. I did however think that Tyler's hypothesis that AI will curate people's social media feed to free up time was simply dumb. I think it entirely ignores why most people use social media, which is both an escape and an addiction. It's like suggesting that people will spend less time drinking and drunk if we provide everyone with High proof alcohol for free. They aren't drinking it for the calories.
underseacables 3y ago
I know a couple who are teachers, elementary and high school. They said the students are always on their phones, with earbuds, but trying to get them to stop can be dangerous. Students get aggressive and sometimes violent when teachers try to enforce decorum and attention. I think banning phones in schools is an urgent need, at the very least.
- chmod600 3y ago
  Maybe a dumb idea, but can schools use jamming or shielding?
  - newsclues 3y ago
    Phones have offline content and wired headphones exist. People adapt
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      Forget all the Khan Academies of the world, let kids be bored on TI-83s and learn programming the ol' fashioned way!
    - chmod600 3y ago
      Are the adaptations healthier?
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Not without breaking several laws, and potentially putting people in danger - how do you call 911 in an emergency if the school is in a signal blackout?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Shielding is probably bad and expensive, but is it illegal?
      - 3y ago
Solvency 3y ago
depression existed before smartphones, but now everyone can record viral tiktoks lamenting their depression for views/engagement while other depressed people consume it
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Worse than that, there's sites where they can discuss suicide and get advice on methods. Now maybe adults should be free to discuss these things, but it's certainly something that young people should be protected from.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    The alt.suicide.holiday FAQ has existed for a very long time.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      And? Do documents suddenly become suitable for kids when they — the documents, not the kids — are old enough?
      - Tomte 3y ago
        The information has always been openly available, that‘s not new.
        ben_w 3y ago
        That is a restatement of a clause in the question (document is old), not an answer (is it suitable for kids).
    - neglesaks 3y ago
      USENET was generally known to and read only by adults. That doesn't apply to youth today like machine-gun-cadence, trivially accessible, algo-driven audiovisual content on Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok etc. Is.
jncfhnb 3y ago
I blame the crushing anxiety of a bleak economic outlook personally
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
  I don't understand this thinking, civilization has never been richer. With the advancements we had in the last 150 years in tech/medicine/etc it's never been so easier to live and enjoy life. Even a poor person in my lousy eastern europe country lives so much better than kings lived 150 years ago. Where does this anxiety comes from?
  - wccrawford 3y ago
    From the media. Even if there's nothing objectively bad to worry about, the media is compelled to find something that people would rather watch than other channels. They "spin" things or invent them wholesale, just to maintain their paychecks. We have it better than ever before in basically everything. But the media can't just report that, they have to find things that "need" improving and present them as dire straits. Children, since they haven't learned to filter it out yet, feel that as soul-crushing dread. And since it's nothing they can do anything about, they feel helpless.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      That’s not the whole picture. Most of western civilization is in severe danger of collapsing into fascist dictatorships or being taken over by same, egged on by truly deranged billionaires who somehow don’t think it will negatively affect them. Antivax hysteria is bringing back mid-20th century disease. Climate change appears to be accelerating on the worst-case side. Militarized police departments. Racial injustice has always been with us in the USA, but now it’s been made visible to everyone, and it’s very clear that some people — who were supposed to be the good guys — not only don’t care, but actively support it. Multiple state governments are now encouraging book banning and child labor. Do we need to mention women’s healthcare? And you, old person, are saying “you have it better than I had it in 1970’s jfc” — that’s true for some values of “you” and “I”, but you’re completely missing the point.
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
This is a great interview, but I’m not sure why the submission’s title was changed. Article is actually titled as follows: > Jonathan Haidt Wants You to Take Away Your Kid’s Phone The part where Haidt discusses “market failure” for tech companies is interesting and suggests society needs totally different laws to manage big tech (including social media). I also thought this particular answer from Haidt’s interview was interesting, about what may happen to Gen Z: > The brain is literally rewiring, literally in the sense that neurons are seeking each other out. Neurons are fading away if they’re not used, synapses are forming or fading away. That happens very rapidly in the first couple of years of life, then it slows down. But in puberty it speeds up. So puberty is a time of really important rewiring, and traditional societies would give young people some guidance into how you make the transition to adulthood. We don’t do that. We give them an iPhone and an iPad and we say, “Here, we’re going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the Internet chosen by algorithm for their extremity—that’s how you’re going to rewire your brain.” > So it is possible that there are lasting effects and that Gen Z, for the rest of their lives, will be more anxious and fragile. That is possible—we just don’t know. But the optimistic thing I can say is that there’s a lot they can do to make themselves better quickly. > I teach a course at N.Y.U. Stern called Flourishing. It’s an undergraduate positive-psychology course. And one of the most important things I do with the class is to go through their notifications with them. Two hundred to five hundred a day is typically how many the students get. And I say, “Turn off notifications for everything except for five apps. If you could only keep on five apps, like Uber—you surely want to keep on Uber and Lyft because you need to know, Is the car coming or not? But do you need an update from the New York Times or from The New Yorker or anybody else?”
- fortran77 3y ago
  I submitted with original title, per HN guidelines.
  - beardyw 3y ago
    But "unless it is misleading or linkbait"
kelseyfrog 3y ago
The only problem is that his methodology is no better than lining up time-series data and finding spurious correlations[1]. If we did this with any other problem, we would be happy to point out the problem with this approach. Nutritional studies have more scientific rigor than what Haidt is hocking and we're happy to point out standards of evidence. All I'm asking is that we don't alter our standard of evidence simply because we agree with the conclusion. It's bad science and a bad way of making decisions. RCT advocates should have easy pickings here. 1. http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- navane 3y ago
  It's risk times consequences. The risk assessment might not be up to scientific standards, but the consequences are big. Also, it's not just about statistics, in this case we have a pretty intuitive grasp on the mechanics at play, they are not far fetched.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    Risks have to be based in reality. Our greatest reality check is the scientific process. We can make up risks endlessly, see the AI-as-an-existential-threat debate. It simply is not grounded in reality. All I'm asking is transparency. People make non-scientific claims and conclusions all the time. Folks just need to be honest that this is what they're doing so they aren't fooling themselves and others.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Haidt's rebuttal to your argument of spurious correlation: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    > Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults. I stopped there. We're talking specifically about teenage depression and the cited study is adults. If Haidt wants us to take results from one subgroup and apply it to another, he has to provide evidence. That's how this process works.
iteria 3y ago
This push for tech abstinence will end much like sex abstinence. Instead of "wait until you're an adult" we should instead be teaching our child good habits. The issue is of course that most adults don't have good habits for children to modle either. My daughter has had access to a tablet since she was 12 months old. She's 5 currently, but she's not a tablet zombie as I so commonly see reported of toddlers with free access to phones. Just yesterday, my daughter freely, without my intervention, put away her tablet to play with a child who happened into the room we were in. She never touched it again until we were bad into the car and begged me to leave and play with her new friend outside instead of ask for another set of headphones for the friend. This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. As someone who grew up with the internet in elementary school, I feel extremely confident, I can keep this up even as my preschooler turns into a kid into a teen. I just think it's a shame that I'm surrounded by parents with intention of teaching her kids about how to responsibly use their devices or they want to deny their kid access at all like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal with infinite stroll once they turn 18.
- blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
  I guess my observation is that most parents, even competent ones, fail to get this right and end up with phone or tablet addicted children. Maybe there is some approach that teaches them a better way, but I wonder if avoiding devices entirely is a less risky path if you aren’t confident in your ability to teach them how to use devices. > This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. Do you mean like exposure to how different cultures live with technology?
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    There's an assumption lurking here that I feel needs to be dragged out into the open. This entire line of reasoning assumes that there is something teachable that would circumvent screen addiction, with a secondary assumption that kids are programmable and will accept whatever instruction is provided regardless of competing inputs. This seems questionable that a child can be armed to compete against a couple decades of psyops research by some of the best funded private organizations on the planet.
barfard 3y ago
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SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
> We expect market mechanisms to matter. So if you hurt your customers, they’re not likely to come back. But this is a market failure because the kids are not the customers. The kids aren’t giving Facebook money. The kids are the product. Their attention is the product. The customers are the advertisers. So we have a market failure. I’m not for more regulation or big government. But I find this difficult to argue with. Their customers do not care about damage done, and the people being damaged mostly have no idea.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  This is the problem that often gets overlooked in these "tech is bad" discussions. It's not the tech itself. It's not the concept of social media. The problem is when every aspect of tech is corrupted to maximize ad impressions (and this goes beyond social media - the vast majority of consumer technology is chasing "engagement"). Regulating away this disgrace of a business model and tech will become much more sane & safe, including for children.
  - rustcleaner 3y ago
    Not just ads, the whole model is rotten! It should cause bankruptcy through fines to run a company which harvests your data and piecemeals features at tiered pricing (and worse: subscription) to maximize yield from you like you're a soybean plant in a crop! This is a game of brinksmanship between companies and [apparent] customers these days! We fix this by mandating all subscription services at least show you the Present Value of a perpetuity at the cashflow of the subscription on checkout (discounted at the highest US bond yield); ideally they must also offer to the customer the option to instead pay that Present Value in lieu of the recurring subscription charge (but also, when the customer quits the company must return the difference of the perpetuity and the annuity representing the whole period in the subscription).
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      My problem with the line of thinking is that you are addressing a today problem, But not thinking long enough about the problem you’re about to create. The market, the amount of money we’re talking about, the amount of influence that is a hand… It’s not going to go away because we passed a regulation or two. I don’t think there is any solution. I certainly don’t think that one solution would come from government. However, a multi approach explaining what these companies are doing, and some regulation and some pressure put on their actual customers, the advertisers, might move the needle.
neonate 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240421152037/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/jonathan-haidt-wants-you-to-take-away-your-kids-phone https://web.archive.org/web/20240421152037/https://www.newyo... https://archive.ph/cCpHU https://archive.ph/cCpHU
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jcutrell 3y ago
The social media I use today is primarily content oriented (reddit for entertainment, HN for eng news, occasional tiktok for funny videos with my wife). I left Facebook behind about 10 years ago, and left Twitter when it was morphed into whatever it is now. As a parent of two children, we will hold off on social networking media for a long time most likely. Content can be valuable, and our children largely use their devices for content interests (YouTube) and creation (various apps and games like Minecraft). I would love to see studies that better explain the effects of these habits as they relate to the "networking" part of social networks and media. I'd argue right now that my LinkedIn consumption is probably more harmful than my TikTok consumption, in terms of depression.
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uejfiweun 3y ago
I tend to think that these are more symptoms than causes. And the disease is that we just put way too much pressure on youth. You need to work hard for your whole youth to get into a good school, then work hard there to get a good job, then work hard for the rest of your life. One serious mistake (these days this might just be the wrong comment) and it's all over. A subset of your peers will take great pleasure in cancelling you for clout points. You also need to have great extracurriculars in order to get into the good school, you need to have a fulfilling social life, you need to be good at relationships and get experience while you're young. You need to stay fit and active, yet also pick a lucrative field that generally ends up with you sitting in a chair all day. All this while evidently the world is ending in a few years due to climate, you're constantly being told that one of the political parties seeks to destroy the world, you're constantly being shat on due to your skin color no matter who you are, housing is completely out of reach, enemy nations constantly circle the west looking for blood, etc. There's too much stuff and for me personally, the only solution has been to let most of it go, to try to care about as little of it as possible. I'm happier now than I've ever been. But students often have no choice but to care since this stuff affects their futures so much, and it results in insane amounts of depression and anxiety, the same sort I certainly experienced before I had a plan more figured out.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
The anxiety and depression sets in when the realization comes that there is an ocean between seeing somebody doing something cool on social media, and BE the person doing something cool in real life. You can only be a spectator for so long, "monkey see, monkey do", except when you see something on social media that you deem interesting becomes impossible to do it within a short timeframe, so the lack of action makes us feel like something is missing. Just like drugs tapering a good starting point would be to focus on social media content that is actionable.
anonym29 3y ago
Haidt is a brilliant thinker who I believe has accurately diagnosed the cause of the symptoms. The problem with Haidt isn't with his diagnosis, but his recommended course of treatment. Haidt is a member of the camp that believes age-gating is the solution - the kind that involves users being compelled to perform facial scans or upload government-issued photo ID, which are both HUGE invasions of privacy.
- cap1434 3y ago
  Interesting. Do you have sources of him recommending those specific solutions? I’m curious to read his rationale.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    Yes, I do! Haidt himself discussed this in depth in an interview he did with Nick Gillespie from Reason a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ssJbKE55rY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ssJbKE55rY 47:30 is where they start diving into policy proposals
    - unraveller 3y ago
      Haidt offers up a low expectation parenting trick, just a one-time easy harmonic 'no socials for kids' from them and if it fails like ever other attempt then we make the state make us sing in key. The way he feigns much difficulty to understand the baby & the steak argument is very revealing. Responsible kids deserve the chance to have fun and be taught by elders where the line of too risky play is. When he seems so indifferent to the slippery slope of the state picking up all the slack for the parents it can easily be taken for the main aim of his work.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Why should software/internet be treated differently? Tons of things are age gated, why is this particular thing off limits? We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!
postepowanieadm 3y ago
I don't know, before 2008 economy seemed to be better. Now costs of life constantly increase, I'm not sure about maintaining my level of life, as politicians see taxation as the ultimate solution to any problem whatsoever. Also, witnessing government calling lock-downs and effectively imprisoning me for undisclosed time without any way of earning any money is disheartening. Why struggle?
incomingpain 3y ago
Haidt cherry picks his data to illegitimately blame social media. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428496/figure/F2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428496/figure/... The data is clear that this mental health crisis started in the late 90s. Before social media even existed.

81 points by fortran77 3y ago

RobotToaster 3y ago

Obviously nothing to do with declining living standards and social atomisation. must be the phones.

grugagag 3y ago
There are multiple factors at play, phones being one of them.
unclebucknasty 3y ago
Social atomization arises from a lack of social connections. Not too far a stretch to see how our device / social media time might contribute to a breakdown in deep social connections.

bluescrn 3y ago

Let them have old Nokias. Calls and texts only. Inexpensive (not a theft magnet), durable, long battery life. No social media (or online gaming even?) until at least 16, if not 18 or 21, seems entirely reasonable given how much it messes with the heads of full-grown adults.

vundercind 3y ago
We’re finally about to the point that our kids kinda need something. Payphones don’t exist anymore, after all. We’re planing on a shared Nokia at first, maybe separate ones as they get older. We figure if they want a smartphone, they can have one when they can pay for both the phone and the data line themselves. If they can hold down a part-time job they might be responsible enough for it. If it matters that much to them, they’ll do what they need to get it. If not… guess it wasn’t that important.
- graeme 3y ago
  A cellular Apple Watch seems like a decent possibility. Has anyone tried this? Has phone, messages, weather, location sharing, ability to google basic stuff. But very, very hard to use compulsively. You can even add things such as instagram apps but they're just not that compelling in a small format.
  - vundercind 3y ago
    Still has to be tied to a phone, right? Or can they operate without ever being connected to a phone, now?
grugagag 3y ago
The problem with older phones is an interminable deluge of fake robocalls and soliciting text messages which make them practically unusable. Smart phones can filter these out but come with a different flavors of cancer
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Some carriers offer services that do a pretty good job of filtering these out. You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone.
  - rustcleaner 3y ago
    >You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone. Nope. You get a blacklist as a basic feature, but a whitelist has to be installed (on Android). I use Silence (single Android profile) or Yet Another Call Blocker (multi Android profile) [both on F-Droid]. I add * to the blacklist then set the ignore/skip for numbers in contacts setting. You literally cannot make my phone ring without being added to my contacts. This should have been the standardest of standard features for years, which is just another example of Out To Get You games companies play on retail customers (another example of a set of standard features which should be ubiquitous is the Privacy.com cards: every bank or credit card company should offer the same virtual cards and control features but practically none do: screw you Mr. Customer buy the upgrade/DLC/"Pro edition!").
    - rustcleaner 3y ago
      I'd like to see DMCA rolled back in a way that it is almost legally encouraged to break security systems on products, in order to maximize either more owner control or maximize performance left on the table and is physically there (even in code) but is otherwise locked out in software. In my wet dreams: gone will be the days of one assembly line, one physical object, many grades of product performance dependent on '''licensing''' codes and such. You don't want the customer to have heated seats? Don't ship the heated seats! Don't like that the customer is hacking your software/firmware to enable those features, and sharing the modifications (just the steps to mod, like a diff patch)? Tough cookies mate, actually here's a 20%-of-last-year-gross-revenue fine for anticompetitive and anticustomer sovereignty business practices. Pray we don't seize all assets and liquidate you, next time you try this trick again. Imagine if companies had to treat customers like a defendant has to treat Your Honor in a courtroom, or they get boycotted and fined to bankruptcy... that would be niiice. :^)

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

The CWT episode where Haidt spoke to Tyler on this was one of the more heated ones recently. Recommended, get some popcorn. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...

adolph 3y ago
Well worth a listen. Cowen’s dander was up as if he were a regular HN contributor.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
Yeah, Tyler normally plays softball with guests, albeit with interesting questions. He really did a lot of pushing back on this one, and it was really interesting to see their different approaches. Haidt really seemed focus on finding common ground with Tyler personally, while Tyler was far more interested in challenging hadiat's position. Ultimately, I felt they were talking about different points. Tyler thought that it was on net positive on average, or at least will be in the global long run. Haidt was talking about worsening outcomes for a subset of the population, and perhaps the average today. My priors lead me to agree with basically both of them in their own domains. I think social media today is increasing harm and dropping the mean outcome, but also increasing the performance for children who successfully navigate it. I think long-term, culture will evolve to develop better habits around social media. I did however think that Tyler's hypothesis that AI will curate people's social media feed to free up time was simply dumb. I think it entirely ignores why most people use social media, which is both an escape and an addiction. It's like suggesting that people will spend less time drinking and drunk if we provide everyone with High proof alcohol for free. They aren't drinking it for the calories.

underseacables 3y ago

I know a couple who are teachers, elementary and high school. They said the students are always on their phones, with earbuds, but trying to get them to stop can be dangerous. Students get aggressive and sometimes violent when teachers try to enforce decorum and attention. I think banning phones in schools is an urgent need, at the very least.

chmod600 3y ago
Maybe a dumb idea, but can schools use jamming or shielding?
- newsclues 3y ago
  Phones have offline content and wired headphones exist. People adapt
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Forget all the Khan Academies of the world, let kids be bored on TI-83s and learn programming the ol' fashioned way!
  - chmod600 3y ago
    Are the adaptations healthier?
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  Not without breaking several laws, and potentially putting people in danger - how do you call 911 in an emergency if the school is in a signal blackout?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Shielding is probably bad and expensive, but is it illegal?
    - 3y ago

Solvency 3y ago

depression existed before smartphones, but now everyone can record viral tiktoks lamenting their depression for views/engagement while other depressed people consume it

bluescrn 3y ago
Worse than that, there's sites where they can discuss suicide and get advice on methods. Now maybe adults should be free to discuss these things, but it's certainly something that young people should be protected from.
- Tomte 3y ago
  The alt.suicide.holiday FAQ has existed for a very long time.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    And? Do documents suddenly become suitable for kids when they — the documents, not the kids — are old enough?
    - Tomte 3y ago
      The information has always been openly available, that‘s not new.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        That is a restatement of a clause in the question (document is old), not an answer (is it suitable for kids).
  - neglesaks 3y ago
    USENET was generally known to and read only by adults. That doesn't apply to youth today like machine-gun-cadence, trivially accessible, algo-driven audiovisual content on Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok etc. Is.

jncfhnb 3y ago

I blame the crushing anxiety of a bleak economic outlook personally

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
I don't understand this thinking, civilization has never been richer. With the advancements we had in the last 150 years in tech/medicine/etc it's never been so easier to live and enjoy life. Even a poor person in my lousy eastern europe country lives so much better than kings lived 150 years ago. Where does this anxiety comes from?
- wccrawford 3y ago
  From the media. Even if there's nothing objectively bad to worry about, the media is compelled to find something that people would rather watch than other channels. They "spin" things or invent them wholesale, just to maintain their paychecks. We have it better than ever before in basically everything. But the media can't just report that, they have to find things that "need" improving and present them as dire straits. Children, since they haven't learned to filter it out yet, feel that as soul-crushing dread. And since it's nothing they can do anything about, they feel helpless.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    That’s not the whole picture. Most of western civilization is in severe danger of collapsing into fascist dictatorships or being taken over by same, egged on by truly deranged billionaires who somehow don’t think it will negatively affect them. Antivax hysteria is bringing back mid-20th century disease. Climate change appears to be accelerating on the worst-case side. Militarized police departments. Racial injustice has always been with us in the USA, but now it’s been made visible to everyone, and it’s very clear that some people — who were supposed to be the good guys — not only don’t care, but actively support it. Multiple state governments are now encouraging book banning and child labor. Do we need to mention women’s healthcare? And you, old person, are saying “you have it better than I had it in 1970’s jfc” — that’s true for some values of “you” and “I”, but you’re completely missing the point.

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

This is a great interview, but I’m not sure why the submission’s title was changed. Article is actually titled as follows: > Jonathan Haidt Wants You to Take Away Your Kid’s Phone The part where Haidt discusses “market failure” for tech companies is interesting and suggests society needs totally different laws to manage big tech (including social media). I also thought this particular answer from Haidt’s interview was interesting, about what may happen to Gen Z: > The brain is literally rewiring, literally in the sense that neurons are seeking each other out. Neurons are fading away if they’re not used, synapses are forming or fading away. That happens very rapidly in the first couple of years of life, then it slows down. But in puberty it speeds up. So puberty is a time of really important rewiring, and traditional societies would give young people some guidance into how you make the transition to adulthood. We don’t do that. We give them an iPhone and an iPad and we say, “Here, we’re going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the Internet chosen by algorithm for their extremity—that’s how you’re going to rewire your brain.” > So it is possible that there are lasting effects and that Gen Z, for the rest of their lives, will be more anxious and fragile. That is possible—we just don’t know. But the optimistic thing I can say is that there’s a lot they can do to make themselves better quickly. > I teach a course at N.Y.U. Stern called Flourishing. It’s an undergraduate positive-psychology course. And one of the most important things I do with the class is to go through their notifications with them. Two hundred to five hundred a day is typically how many the students get. And I say, “Turn off notifications for everything except for five apps. If you could only keep on five apps, like Uber—you surely want to keep on Uber and Lyft because you need to know, Is the car coming or not? But do you need an update from the New York Times or from The New Yorker or anybody else?”

fortran77 3y ago
I submitted with original title, per HN guidelines.
- beardyw 3y ago
  But "unless it is misleading or linkbait"

kelseyfrog 3y ago

The only problem is that his methodology is no better than lining up time-series data and finding spurious correlations[1]. If we did this with any other problem, we would be happy to point out the problem with this approach. Nutritional studies have more scientific rigor than what Haidt is hocking and we're happy to point out standards of evidence. All I'm asking is that we don't alter our standard of evidence simply because we agree with the conclusion. It's bad science and a bad way of making decisions. RCT advocates should have easy pickings here. 1. http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

navane 3y ago
It's risk times consequences. The risk assessment might not be up to scientific standards, but the consequences are big. Also, it's not just about statistics, in this case we have a pretty intuitive grasp on the mechanics at play, they are not far fetched.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Risks have to be based in reality. Our greatest reality check is the scientific process. We can make up risks endlessly, see the AI-as-an-existential-threat debate. It simply is not grounded in reality. All I'm asking is transparency. People make non-scientific claims and conclusions all the time. Folks just need to be honest that this is what they're doing so they aren't fooling themselves and others.
hackerlight 3y ago
Haidt's rebuttal to your argument of spurious correlation: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  > Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults. I stopped there. We're talking specifically about teenage depression and the cited study is adults. If Haidt wants us to take results from one subgroup and apply it to another, he has to provide evidence. That's how this process works.

iteria 3y ago

This push for tech abstinence will end much like sex abstinence. Instead of "wait until you're an adult" we should instead be teaching our child good habits. The issue is of course that most adults don't have good habits for children to modle either. My daughter has had access to a tablet since she was 12 months old. She's 5 currently, but she's not a tablet zombie as I so commonly see reported of toddlers with free access to phones. Just yesterday, my daughter freely, without my intervention, put away her tablet to play with a child who happened into the room we were in. She never touched it again until we were bad into the car and begged me to leave and play with her new friend outside instead of ask for another set of headphones for the friend. This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. As someone who grew up with the internet in elementary school, I feel extremely confident, I can keep this up even as my preschooler turns into a kid into a teen. I just think it's a shame that I'm surrounded by parents with intention of teaching her kids about how to responsibly use their devices or they want to deny their kid access at all like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal with infinite stroll once they turn 18.

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
I guess my observation is that most parents, even competent ones, fail to get this right and end up with phone or tablet addicted children. Maybe there is some approach that teaches them a better way, but I wonder if avoiding devices entirely is a less risky path if you aren’t confident in your ability to teach them how to use devices. > This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. Do you mean like exposure to how different cultures live with technology?
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  There's an assumption lurking here that I feel needs to be dragged out into the open. This entire line of reasoning assumes that there is something teachable that would circumvent screen addiction, with a secondary assumption that kids are programmable and will accept whatever instruction is provided regardless of competing inputs. This seems questionable that a child can be armed to compete against a couple decades of psyops research by some of the best funded private organizations on the planet.

barfard 3y ago

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SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

> We expect market mechanisms to matter. So if you hurt your customers, they’re not likely to come back. But this is a market failure because the kids are not the customers. The kids aren’t giving Facebook money. The kids are the product. Their attention is the product. The customers are the advertisers. So we have a market failure. I’m not for more regulation or big government. But I find this difficult to argue with. Their customers do not care about damage done, and the people being damaged mostly have no idea.

Nextgrid 3y ago
This is the problem that often gets overlooked in these "tech is bad" discussions. It's not the tech itself. It's not the concept of social media. The problem is when every aspect of tech is corrupted to maximize ad impressions (and this goes beyond social media - the vast majority of consumer technology is chasing "engagement"). Regulating away this disgrace of a business model and tech will become much more sane & safe, including for children.
- rustcleaner 3y ago
  Not just ads, the whole model is rotten! It should cause bankruptcy through fines to run a company which harvests your data and piecemeals features at tiered pricing (and worse: subscription) to maximize yield from you like you're a soybean plant in a crop! This is a game of brinksmanship between companies and [apparent] customers these days! We fix this by mandating all subscription services at least show you the Present Value of a perpetuity at the cashflow of the subscription on checkout (discounted at the highest US bond yield); ideally they must also offer to the customer the option to instead pay that Present Value in lieu of the recurring subscription charge (but also, when the customer quits the company must return the difference of the perpetuity and the annuity representing the whole period in the subscription).
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    My problem with the line of thinking is that you are addressing a today problem, But not thinking long enough about the problem you’re about to create. The market, the amount of money we’re talking about, the amount of influence that is a hand… It’s not going to go away because we passed a regulation or two. I don’t think there is any solution. I certainly don’t think that one solution would come from government. However, a multi approach explaining what these companies are doing, and some regulation and some pressure put on their actual customers, the advertisers, might move the needle.

neonate 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240421152037/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/jonathan-haidt-wants-you-to-take-away-your-kids-phone https://web.archive.org/web/20240421152037/https://www.newyo... https://archive.ph/cCpHU https://archive.ph/cCpHU

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jcutrell 3y ago

The social media I use today is primarily content oriented (reddit for entertainment, HN for eng news, occasional tiktok for funny videos with my wife). I left Facebook behind about 10 years ago, and left Twitter when it was morphed into whatever it is now. As a parent of two children, we will hold off on social networking media for a long time most likely. Content can be valuable, and our children largely use their devices for content interests (YouTube) and creation (various apps and games like Minecraft). I would love to see studies that better explain the effects of these habits as they relate to the "networking" part of social networks and media. I'd argue right now that my LinkedIn consumption is probably more harmful than my TikTok consumption, in terms of depression.

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uejfiweun 3y ago

I tend to think that these are more symptoms than causes. And the disease is that we just put way too much pressure on youth. You need to work hard for your whole youth to get into a good school, then work hard there to get a good job, then work hard for the rest of your life. One serious mistake (these days this might just be the wrong comment) and it's all over. A subset of your peers will take great pleasure in cancelling you for clout points. You also need to have great extracurriculars in order to get into the good school, you need to have a fulfilling social life, you need to be good at relationships and get experience while you're young. You need to stay fit and active, yet also pick a lucrative field that generally ends up with you sitting in a chair all day. All this while evidently the world is ending in a few years due to climate, you're constantly being told that one of the political parties seeks to destroy the world, you're constantly being shat on due to your skin color no matter who you are, housing is completely out of reach, enemy nations constantly circle the west looking for blood, etc. There's too much stuff and for me personally, the only solution has been to let most of it go, to try to care about as little of it as possible. I'm happier now than I've ever been. But students often have no choice but to care since this stuff affects their futures so much, and it results in insane amounts of depression and anxiety, the same sort I certainly experienced before I had a plan more figured out.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

The anxiety and depression sets in when the realization comes that there is an ocean between seeing somebody doing something cool on social media, and BE the person doing something cool in real life. You can only be a spectator for so long, "monkey see, monkey do", except when you see something on social media that you deem interesting becomes impossible to do it within a short timeframe, so the lack of action makes us feel like something is missing. Just like drugs tapering a good starting point would be to focus on social media content that is actionable.

anonym29 3y ago

Haidt is a brilliant thinker who I believe has accurately diagnosed the cause of the symptoms. The problem with Haidt isn't with his diagnosis, but his recommended course of treatment. Haidt is a member of the camp that believes age-gating is the solution - the kind that involves users being compelled to perform facial scans or upload government-issued photo ID, which are both HUGE invasions of privacy.

cap1434 3y ago
Interesting. Do you have sources of him recommending those specific solutions? I’m curious to read his rationale.
- anonym29 3y ago
  Yes, I do! Haidt himself discussed this in depth in an interview he did with Nick Gillespie from Reason a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ssJbKE55rY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ssJbKE55rY 47:30 is where they start diving into policy proposals
  - unraveller 3y ago
    Haidt offers up a low expectation parenting trick, just a one-time easy harmonic 'no socials for kids' from them and if it fails like ever other attempt then we make the state make us sing in key. The way he feigns much difficulty to understand the baby & the steak argument is very revealing. Responsible kids deserve the chance to have fun and be taught by elders where the line of too risky play is. When he seems so indifferent to the slippery slope of the state picking up all the slack for the parents it can easily be taken for the main aim of his work.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Why should software/internet be treated differently? Tons of things are age gated, why is this particular thing off limits? We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!

postepowanieadm 3y ago

I don't know, before 2008 economy seemed to be better. Now costs of life constantly increase, I'm not sure about maintaining my level of life, as politicians see taxation as the ultimate solution to any problem whatsoever. Also, witnessing government calling lock-downs and effectively imprisoning me for undisclosed time without any way of earning any money is disheartening. Why struggle?

incomingpain 3y ago

Haidt cherry picks his data to illegitimately blame social media. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428496/figure/F2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428496/figure/... The data is clear that this mental health crisis started in the late 90s. Before social media even existed.