9 ms·

Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he's been directionally cor

• csours 1y ago
  > Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree. In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win. Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    It's also especially vulnerable to "motte and bailey" arguments. Harassing people over competing fandoms is out of order. However, a lot of #metoo gets filed under "cancel culture" when often there is no other working means of getting redress for sexual harassment or assault other than going public, and hoping the perpetrator gets worse backlash than the victim.
    • Aunche 1y ago
      > when often there is no other working means of getting redress for sexual harassment or assault other than going public, and hoping the perpetrator gets worse backlash than the victim. This is by definition cancel culture. Unfortunately some bad actors will abuse this as a way to hurt someone. I've seen this happen twice, and fear of this happening is enough for good men to be unnecessarily distant towards women. That said, people getting away with sexual assault seems to be significantly more common.
      • anal_reactor 1y ago
        As a man who will never rape a woman, I care a little about the possibility of a random stranger having a small possibility of being raped, but I care much more about myself getting potentially unjustly accused of sexual abuse and suffering consequences. If engaging in any interaction with a woman will get me an acquaintance at best and ruin my career at worst, then this sounds like a very bad deal.
        • lern_too_spel 1y ago
          This is a ridiculous take. Defamation suits still exist. Not interacting with colleagues of a different gender, on the other hand, will get you disciplined and eventually fired. Just don't be a creep like Joel Kaplan, allegedly.
          • csours 1y ago
            It is a morally disgusting, but very rational take. It is morally disgusting because of the relative harms between the parties, but very rational because of the personal risk/reward calculation.
            • lern_too_spel 1y ago
              It's precisely the risk/reward calculation that is wrong. If you get accused of doing something you didn't do, you can file a defamation lawsuit. If you stop interacting with people, you will get fired.
  • jgeada 1y ago
    Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture! Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you. Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient. While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
    • marknutter 1y ago
      Let's look back at who these "undesirable people" who were being excluded/ostracized were throughout history, shall we, and see how well your "While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you" dismissal holds up.
      • foldr 1y ago
        You can certainly ostracize people who don’t deserve to be ostracized, but it doesn’t follow from that that all social ostracization is inherently bad. Freedom of association and freedom of speech can be used for bad ends as well as good, like most freedoms.
        • marknutter 1y ago
          Who gets to decide what ostracization is good and what ostracization is bad?
          • foldr 1y ago
            I don't think anyone decides that as such. Organizations and individuals decide who they do or don't want to associate with. If it turns out that very few people want to associate with you, then you've been ostracized. Your question is like asking "Who decides which people should be friends?", or "Who decides who should be popular?"
  • intended 1y ago
    However cancel culture is 100% going to evolve once you create an internet, and then leave things to the market to solve. Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society. For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
    • bilbo0s 1y ago
      For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture To someone whose formative years came before the internet, cancel culture looks a lot like plain old boring boycotts? So there would be a lot of confusion as to why it's so big a deal? I tend to agree. You need cancel culture. You need people who oppose cancel culture. You need it all. If you don't have any given one of these kinds of civil freedoms, then you actually don't have a democracy. So a lot of it is just branding. You have to call it cancel culture, because if you were to try and ban the organizing of boycotts, people would laugh at you. It's plainly obvious that you need the freedom to boycott and you need the freedom to oppose the boycott to have a democracy. Haidt's argument in this regard is non-sensical in that boycotts are, pretty much, a democratic norm in and of themselves.
      • intended 1y ago
        Yeah. Good old social boycott. I felt you could see this be figured out in real time, if you looked at how people spoke online. You had many phases online, like the Libertarian phase, and people constantly talking about capitalism being great, and markets being great etc. Then you had 2008, and people started learning about things worked, and you started seeing people and different age brackets coming to terms with their reality and agency. The agency that had previously been defined in market terms! So with everything from anonymous to flash mobs, people put two and two together and figured they could boycott things that they disagreed with. The only time this became an issue is when it started exerting ACTUAL social force. At that point people had to have the difficult conversation of what people were mad about, AND the new manner in which people were exerting force. As is inevitable with any use of force, it gets enmeshed with other people who weild force and power and it becomes just another thing that is seen as oppresive and broken. But its essentially effective (or ineffective) social boycotting.
  • vroomvrooom 1y ago
    [flagged]
• brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  > Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst We can, and probably should, just end the discussion there. Haidt is really good at finding data to support his claims, but then failing to mention that the correlation he's describing as "definitive" is, actually, really weak. This happens throughout "The Anxious Generation," at least. Calling him "directionally correct" when he's pretty bad at actually showing the work as to why he is correct is just saying that you think he has a good point because his vibes match your vibes.
  • setgree 1y ago
    I don't think I'm just saying that. I'd say instead: 1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high. 2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't. (I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
    • silverlake 1y ago
      IIRC the effect size at 0.15 was narrowly for pre-teen girls on social media. Every other age, and all boys, were below 0.1 when looking at total screen time (i.e. games, youtube). Parents should check up on young girls, but most kids will be fine.
• Bukhmanizer 1y ago
  > Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst This is a massive understatement. The ironic thing about Haidt is that his writing is heavily geared towards social media. He writes a good headline and usually has a few facts in there, but is fundamentally non-rigorous. It’s science for skimmers and people who clicked on an article already agreeing with the conclusions and so won’t challenge the “evidence” he provides no matter how weak.
  • mm263 1y ago
    I agree that Haidt is a poor champion for the cause. He’s popular because we are seeing something real happening to our kids and Haidt is the only person who is trying to describe whatever’s going on. We agree with the conclusions because we see it in our own kids, not because of the “moral panic”. It’s a shame he gets there in such a sloppy way, but he’s describing a real phenomenon. I, as a parent, do not need articles and longitudinal studies and double blind peer reviewed studies to tell me that the thing I can observe with my own eyes is real.
    • Apocryphon 1y ago
      I wonder whatever happened to Nicholas Carr, of The Shallows fame. I guess he's got a new book out this year but his critique is more "democracy in distress" now rather than "save the children!" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/books/review/superbloom-nicholas-carr-the-sirens-call-chris-hayes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/books/review/superbloom-n...
      • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
        IMO people care more about their children than about "democracy."
        • Apocryphon 1y ago
          Carr was probably too highfalutin in his focus, and a little ahead of his time. A shame because this sure sounds prescient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F
• krashidov 1y ago
  > If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't have an account. But I have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram all locked down on my phone (my SO has the Screen Time code). I did this because the best minds on earth get paid based on how much I doom scroll. If I don't do this, I routinely have times where I scroll for an hour+. I have argued that the only solution to this is to either ban any sort compensation based on increased engagement of a social media product (probably impossible to enforce or unconstitutional if that still matters). OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. We regulate gambling because it hacks our dopamine loop (although usually associated with much more severe consequences). I think it's ok to regulate the video scroll. Start small with something like enforcing a scroll lock after 30 minutes. To enforce it, just regulate the largest companies.
  • rzz3 1y ago
    > OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. I really don’t want the government telling me what I can or can’t do on my phone, or that an app I enjoy can’t exist. Alcohol exists, gambling exists, cigarettes exist, porn exists, cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either. I don’t want the government to be my dad. And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? These are consumption-side problems in my opinion, and individuals need to bear the responsibility rather than trying to pawn it off on big tech companies or regulators.
    • krashidov 1y ago
      >Alcohol exists And is taxed to minimize consumption, and recoup losses from negative externalities > gambling exists Yes and is banned or highly regulated in many counties. It is also age restricted. >cigarettes exist same as alcohol > cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement Cars today are much safer than they were in the 50s because many many people have died leading to regulations. It's difficult to create a car for the American market because of how many specific American safety regulations there are. Traveling by car is probably one of the most regulated things we do. There are speed bumps, cops, speed cameras, red light cameras etc. It's not like it's the wild west out there. >and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either Congratulations? Because you are perfect I guess we can just assume everyone else is and should be as well? I am not saying the government should tell you what you can or can't do with your phone. I'm saying the government should do something against very large private corporations hacking the dopamine loop on individuals. This could be an engagement tax. This could be just pausing scrolling every 30 minutes for 30 seconds. I know it's a slippery slope. They say television killed the neighbor in the 60s. We have a chance to not repeat the same mistakes of the past. > And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? If we are voting in "technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers" then that seems to be a bigger problem. Why are we voting these people in? Lawmakers are representatives of the people. Not everything they do is dumb. America has done pretty well so they must've done something right in the last 250 years. I'm very much in the pro liberty, pro individual camp, but there is no developed country on earth that has 0 regulation. It is in the nation's best interest to not have a major part of the populace have 6-7 hours of their day sucked by TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram. 6-7 hours a day on the phone probably the norm for children. Children are actually losing their ability to read from this [1]. There are movements to ban phones in schools, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Do you think we should not ban phones in schools because you have "self control and good judgement" therefore children in schools should simply have "self control and good judgement?" 1 - https://substack.com/home/post/p-139758866 https://substack.com/home/post/p-139758866
• thomassmith65 1y ago
  Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms Democracy protects the majority against a minority. "Cancel culture" does the same. They are bedfellows. Liberalism is what protects a minority against the majority. Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism). If someone insults people or breaks norms, and there's a lot of blow back, it doesn't surprise me. Few people complain that they are forbidden from walking the streets nude with a raging erection. The majority doesn't want that kind of freedom of expression. What this has to do with social media companies, don't ask me. I mainly care about the ability of people to make arguments without the government locking them up.
  • starik36 1y ago
    > Democracy protects the majority against a minority. Isn't that the other way around? The laws (and more importantly, the rule of law) are in place to prevent the tyranny of the majority?
    • pseudalopex 1y ago
      > Liberalism is what protects a minority against the majority. > Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism).
    • thomassmith65 1y ago
      Democracy protects the majority against a minority. The minority in this case typically being a powerful minority, like an aristocracy. Democracy is a show of hands. If we outnumber you, we get our way. The laws (and more importantly, the rule of law) are in place to prevent the tyranny of the majority? That is another way to phrase what I wrote, no? Yes, even when we are unpopular, we still have legal 'rights'.
• foldr 1y ago
  > Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms Look around the world at where democratic norms are actually being undone. It’s often the people who are most opposed to so-called ‘cancel culture’ who are busy with the undoing. But perhaps you are willing to be an unusually bipartisan wielder of the term and concede that the major instances of cancel culture in recent times are such things as Hungary banning pride parades, Trump bullying universities and deporting people for holding the wrong political views, and school libraries banning books with LGBTQ themes.
  • derektank 1y ago
    Trump and the right wing engage in cancel culture. Ben Shapiro tried to cancel James Gunn, Bill Ackman tried to cancel Ivy League graduates that protested in support of Gaza, there are many examples. The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.
    • foldr 1y ago
      That’s exactly what’s changing now that the right is in power. People are already being deported for protesting in support of Gaza. We shall see how long academia is able to maintain any degree of independence. The Trump administration is not exactly being subtle about it.
    • quasse 1y ago
      > The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts. The part of this you should be worried about is that they've realized they now have enough hard power to use violence against ideological enemies instead of rhetoric. They're being completely open that they plan to extend this treatment to native born U.S. citizens too [1]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-ja...
    • 1y ago
• fny 1y ago
  A determined skeptic would see Haidt is directly quoting TikTok's own admissions found in legal briefs. Frankly, it's terrifying.
• os2warpman 1y ago
  >Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms Cancel culture is a myth. It is a label used to denigrate people and organizations who exercise the fundamental right to distance themselves from associations they find distasteful or non-beneficial. There is not a single "cancelled" person who does not retain the ability to work and exercise their speech rights. This is not opinion it is fact. I welcome any attempt to prove me wrong. I will respond with acting credits, tweets, and photographs of the cancelled person serving in a position of authority and/or being chauffeured between media appearances where they complain about being cancelled to an audience of millions. "Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive.
  • emptysongglass 1y ago
    > "Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive. That sounds exactly like the same made up language of "sealioning" and "concern trolling" weaponized by the same people accusing the other side of making up "cancel culture" and "virtue signaling". Maybe you don't hold the ethical high ground and never did.
    • os2warpman 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • whatshisface 1y ago
        The effects of cancellation primarily fall on people who don't have as much power as the Weinsteins or P-Diddys of the world. If it happened to you or me, we wouldn't take a month break from speaking at awards ceremonies then make four movies.
        • os2warpman 1y ago
          >If it happened to you or me The only examples you gave are rapists. I can only speak for me, but it is extraordinarily unlikely to the point of impossibility that I will commit rape. If I do, I expect people to "cancel" me.
• 1270018080 1y ago
  People are still taking shots at the cancel culture boogeyman in 2025? It's just an organic response to people not wanting evil slop shoved in their faces on an unregulated internet.
• jmyeet 1y ago
  > Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms One's position on "cancel culture" tends to reveal a lot about somebody's politics. Complaining about cancel culture tends to correlate highly with conservative political views. The idea is that some people can't freely express their opinions. This is the same idea that leads the likes of Elon Musk to complain about the lack of "free speech". When right-wingers say "free speech" they mean "hate speech", more specifically "the freedom to express hate speech". And when they complain about "cancel culture", what they're really complaining about it there being consequences to their speech [1]. So if somebody goes on a racist screed and they lost their job because their employer doesn't want to be associated with such views, that gets labelled as "cancel culture". The very same people defend cancelling the permanent resident status of somebody who simply protested war crimes committed by Israel (ie Mahmoud Khalil) with no due process, a clear First Amendment violation. As a reminder, the First Amendment is a restriction on government activity. For some reason, the same people who were vaccine experts 2 years ago who are now constitutional experts don't seem to understand this. [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel-culture-kaepernick/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...
  • mvdtnz 1y ago
    The unstated major premise of your screed is that "conservative political belief" are inherently wrong, factually and morally. Not everyone agrees with that.
  • emptysongglass 1y ago
    Is it not clear that cancel culture played a role in the broader misinformation landscape? The argument seems to be undermining itself. Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
  • AlexandrB 1y ago
    Can you provide a coherent definition of hate speech that doesn't include chants like "from the river to the sea" or phrases like "kill all men"?