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Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (th

Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned here. The mention of phones and other influences in teen behavior is completely unrelated to the main point in the discussion and just serves to provide credibility by association. All in all, this is not science, it is just a reductionist oped presented as fact using classic internet hooks.

WorkerBee28474 2y ago
> All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.
- potatoman22 2y ago
  Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities. They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building or another. source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
    - jasonfarnon 2y ago
      I hear a lot about excessive parenting on here but I wonder if it's just a segment of society. Can anyone but wealthy parents have time to occupy their kids 24-7? The freedom I and friends had as a kid was not a decision of my parents so much as a necessity. Parents dont get home from work until 6, school lets out at 2, we get at least 4 free hours of undisturbed freedom. Why would that be different now?
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I think the idea of 24/7 parenting has is definitely not universal, given the amount of unsupervised time spent online and gaming. I suspect most of this time just moved from streets and parks to bedrooms in front of a screen.
      - richk449 2y ago
        An event that happens much too often to me: My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”.
        InitialLastName 2y ago
        Related: Every single one of my toddler's grandparents defaults to sticking a phone in his face (and has since he was a baby). Like, they all managed to raise children into moderately functional adults without heavy use of smartphones, and have had explicit instructions not to do that. Why do they think it's the thing to do?
        irjustin 2y ago
        > My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”. Ooof this is me on Sundays - the only day allowed screen time, but man yea, if our girls are by themselves then a screen for them and a screen for me and we're all happy.
        inanutshellus 2y ago
        Also relevant: If you try to encourage non-screen time socially, their friends stop coming over. At best, your kid will just want to leave the house to go watch tv/play video games over at the friend's house, but just as likely is that the kid stops having a friend because they're not mindshared in anymore.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      Add on top of that the communities they do have are all virtual. Virtual groups are a fine addition to, but not a good replacement for physical interaction. Being in physical proximity is just a fundamentally different experience. I remember rather fondly the days of LAN parties, and a small part of me wishes we had kept the networking without going all the way to the Internet. Yes, the irony of this post, and my career as primarily a developer of websites, is not lost on me.
      - squigz 2y ago
        > Add on top of that the communities they do have are all virtual. Virtual groups are a fine addition to, but not a good replacement for physical interaction. Why not?
        zdragnar 2y ago
        There are a number of takes on this. Everything from limited physical expressiveness, to fundamentally different and more limited conversational abilities in group settings, to a lack of physical preference having subtle emotional changes in how the setting is experienced and probably more things that have been and are being researched. As a microcosm of community breakdown and virtual replacing physical space, just look at the psychological and social impacts of virtual schooling during COVID-19 lockdowns. Obviously, the existential dread of illness, stress of family finances and restricted freedom are all confounding here, so the extent to which physical versus virtual played a role is debatable. Even so, I don't think there's much debate at all that Zoom meetings are in any way a viable substitute for in person classroom teaching and social development.
        naasking 2y ago
        If you're being serious, then you're suggesting that it would be perfectly healthy for a person to literally just lie in bed all day and only interact with people virtually. If you think that isn't healthy, then you are acknowledging that virtual groups are not a replacement for physical interaction, even if you disagree with others on how much physical interaction is required.
- sircastor 2y ago
  I think it's trying to appear to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position. A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills.
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, this is neat, using guilt by association to support a comment alleging the fallacy of guilt by association
  - bradleyjg 2y ago
    I think it's trying to appear to be science. This is fairly common in modern rhetoric. Even among scientists—they’ll write a rigorous paper with narrowly drawn conclusions and then give a much broader science-y interview about it.
  - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
    > A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group While there's nothing wrong with being conservative, the group's founder is a self-described Democrat. > I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills If "growing up in close-knit communities" (from the article) is a traditional value, then yes, they are saying that would be a good thing.
    - peterdobs 2y ago
      [dead]
  - naasking 2y ago
    > A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group It's conservative-leaning because...?
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
drewcoo 2y ago
> had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward . . . to make it work Also known as "motivated reasoning." For what it's worth, it doesn't match what I see here in flyover country. Helicopter parenting came first, then loss of community; loss of kids in the neighborhood playing. I think the helicopter parenting was due to lots of pressure to "protect" the kids. I've even heard of police responding to calls about children walking without adults! The article seems to want to blame tech for a social problem. I guess that gets clicks.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’m not commenting on this study specifically but a ton of research is susceptible to these issues, especially in academia. Most studies have basic gaps in experimentation and statistics, and are basically p hacked or ignoring variables. That doesn’t stop them from being punished or the world from blindly believing that peer review automatically means “quality”.
peterdobs 2y ago
[dead]
AlbertCory 2y ago
Hear. It is totally a just-so story. Possibly there IS no way to prove their assertions. I can tell you that I see kids biking past my house on the way to school every day, and the crossing guards guide many, many kids across the street. What are the numbers? Couldn't tell you. .
naasking 2y ago
> Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work What you're missing is that they've already published the papers and books with all of the citations, these are accessible articles for the masses reviewing their conclusions.
renegat0x0 2y ago
I think not everything can be pure science. It would be hard to write anything. It is still better than most of stuff on the Internet, and that is a good thing. Some people complain about something not because it is lacking, but because they struggle internally with the results. "You didn't run tests 50 times, you run them only 20". I see some parts mentioning religion, and I can guarantee that some people with have problem with only that, as it can often be as a red flag for a bull. I do not also need complex studies to see effect of games, TV on my kids. I can simply observe them.
m0llusk 2y ago
Science starts with discussion. If evidence accumulates and reasonable arguments are made then it may become possible to form a hypothesis or even a theory that might be tested with experimentation. Peer reviewed studies based on randomized trials only come about very late in the process once paradigm change is well under way. What is happening here is some of the initial discussion of important emerging phenomena that we do not yet understand.
mike_hearn 2y ago
There's no need to apologize. This whole line of work by Haidt and his associates has been heavily attacked on the grounds of poor methodologies, and Haidt's responses were astoundingly bad. For example, someone spot checked some of the hundreds of studies he presented and found none of them really supported the social media/teen girl mental health link he was asserting; his response was "they can't all be wrong" and "you shouldn't demand a high standard of evidence in a crisis" (where the evidence there was a crisis was the same evidence he was presenting...)

WorkerBee28474 2y ago

> All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.

potatoman22 2y ago
Since the audience isn't technical enough to realize the author excluded confounders, doesn't that make it even worse?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  Confounders or not, kids don't have crap for communities. They have 24/7 adulting, most of it spent in one building or another. source:5 kids. source:15 years scout leader. source:10 years youth leader, other.
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    I hear a lot about excessive parenting on here but I wonder if it's just a segment of society. Can anyone but wealthy parents have time to occupy their kids 24-7? The freedom I and friends had as a kid was not a decision of my parents so much as a necessity. Parents dont get home from work until 6, school lets out at 2, we get at least 4 free hours of undisturbed freedom. Why would that be different now?
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I think the idea of 24/7 parenting has is definitely not universal, given the amount of unsupervised time spent online and gaming. I suspect most of this time just moved from streets and parks to bedrooms in front of a screen.
    - richk449 2y ago
      An event that happens much too often to me: My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”.
      - InitialLastName 2y ago
        Related: Every single one of my toddler's grandparents defaults to sticking a phone in his face (and has since he was a baby). Like, they all managed to raise children into moderately functional adults without heavy use of smartphones, and have had explicit instructions not to do that. Why do they think it's the thing to do?
      - irjustin 2y ago
        > My son is playing with other kids. I wander off. When I check back, all the kids are watching a screen. I say “what’s going on?” And some parent says “the kids were getting roudy, so I put on a show to calm them down”. Ooof this is me on Sundays - the only day allowed screen time, but man yea, if our girls are by themselves then a screen for them and a screen for me and we're all happy.
      - inanutshellus 2y ago
        Also relevant: If you try to encourage non-screen time socially, their friends stop coming over. At best, your kid will just want to leave the house to go watch tv/play video games over at the friend's house, but just as likely is that the kid stops having a friend because they're not mindshared in anymore.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Add on top of that the communities they do have are all virtual. Virtual groups are a fine addition to, but not a good replacement for physical interaction. Being in physical proximity is just a fundamentally different experience. I remember rather fondly the days of LAN parties, and a small part of me wishes we had kept the networking without going all the way to the Internet. Yes, the irony of this post, and my career as primarily a developer of websites, is not lost on me.
    - squigz 2y ago
      > Add on top of that the communities they do have are all virtual. Virtual groups are a fine addition to, but not a good replacement for physical interaction. Why not?
      - zdragnar 2y ago
        There are a number of takes on this. Everything from limited physical expressiveness, to fundamentally different and more limited conversational abilities in group settings, to a lack of physical preference having subtle emotional changes in how the setting is experienced and probably more things that have been and are being researched. As a microcosm of community breakdown and virtual replacing physical space, just look at the psychological and social impacts of virtual schooling during COVID-19 lockdowns. Obviously, the existential dread of illness, stress of family finances and restricted freedom are all confounding here, so the extent to which physical versus virtual played a role is debatable. Even so, I don't think there's much debate at all that Zoom meetings are in any way a viable substitute for in person classroom teaching and social development.
      - naasking 2y ago
        If you're being serious, then you're suggesting that it would be perfectly healthy for a person to literally just lie in bed all day and only interact with people virtually. If you think that isn't healthy, then you are acknowledging that virtual groups are not a replacement for physical interaction, even if you disagree with others on how much physical interaction is required.
sircastor 2y ago
I think it's trying to appear to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position. A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills.
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, this is neat, using guilt by association to support a comment alleging the fallacy of guilt by association
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  I think it's trying to appear to be science. This is fairly common in modern rhetoric. Even among scientists—they’ll write a rigorous paper with narrowly drawn conclusions and then give a much broader science-y interview about it.
- WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  > A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group While there's nothing wrong with being conservative, the group's founder is a self-described Democrat. > I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills If "growing up in close-knit communities" (from the article) is a traditional value, then yes, they are saying that would be a good thing.
  - peterdobs 2y ago
    [dead]
- naasking 2y ago
  > A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group It's conservative-leaning because...?
- mike_hearn 2y ago

drewcoo 2y ago

> had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward . . . to make it work Also known as "motivated reasoning." For what it's worth, it doesn't match what I see here in flyover country. Helicopter parenting came first, then loss of community; loss of kids in the neighborhood playing. I think the helicopter parenting was due to lots of pressure to "protect" the kids. I've even heard of police responding to calls about children walking without adults! The article seems to want to blame tech for a social problem. I guess that gets clicks.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I’m not commenting on this study specifically but a ton of research is susceptible to these issues, especially in academia. Most studies have basic gaps in experimentation and statistics, and are basically p hacked or ignoring variables. That doesn’t stop them from being punished or the world from blindly believing that peer review automatically means “quality”.

peterdobs 2y ago

[dead]

AlbertCory 2y ago

Hear. It is totally a just-so story. Possibly there IS no way to prove their assertions. I can tell you that I see kids biking past my house on the way to school every day, and the crossing guards guide many, many kids across the street. What are the numbers? Couldn't tell you. .

naasking 2y ago

> Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work What you're missing is that they've already published the papers and books with all of the citations, these are accessible articles for the masses reviewing their conclusions.

renegat0x0 2y ago

I think not everything can be pure science. It would be hard to write anything. It is still better than most of stuff on the Internet, and that is a good thing. Some people complain about something not because it is lacking, but because they struggle internally with the results. "You didn't run tests 50 times, you run them only 20". I see some parts mentioning religion, and I can guarantee that some people with have problem with only that, as it can often be as a red flag for a bull. I do not also need complex studies to see effect of games, TV on my kids. I can simply observe them.

m0llusk 2y ago

Science starts with discussion. If evidence accumulates and reasonable arguments are made then it may become possible to form a hypothesis or even a theory that might be tested with experimentation. Peer reviewed studies based on randomized trials only come about very late in the process once paradigm change is well under way. What is happening here is some of the initial discussion of important emerging phenomena that we do not yet understand.

mike_hearn 2y ago

There's no need to apologize. This whole line of work by Haidt and his associates has been heavily attacked on the grounds of poor methodologies, and Haidt's responses were astoundingly bad. For example, someone spot checked some of the hundreds of studies he presented and found none of them really supported the social media/teen girl mental health link he was asserting; his response was "they can't all be wrong" and "you shouldn't demand a high standard of evidence in a crisis" (where the evidence there was a crisis was the same evidence he was presenting...)