Kudos to Mr Haidt. I wouldn't have the patience to explain over and over again why being addicted to your phone and comparing your looks to global superstars makes girls lonely and depressed.
People will argue over percentage points of an r-value instead of simply asking three girls whether using Instagram four hours a day makes them happy.
Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
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Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#12Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously read…
Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective.
A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that.
And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#13Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#14Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?
I think that coddling weakens middle aged social psychologists.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#15Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#16> girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less.
Not that it proves anything, but the converse argument, that depressed girls spend more time on social media or online in general, should also be examined. If the data could support this thesis to a similar degree, there is no conclusive statement about social media really inducing depression. It isn't just about effect size in my opinion but I don't see this problem answered.
That said, it doesn't need to be depression, there are other venues for negative influences. I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#17The map is indeed not the territory. There is an insane amount of people who live in a fantasy world, where they believe that theory equals practise, which is absolute and utter nonsense. They do not understand the value of experience, most likely because they don't actually have any.
1. One can always derive theory from practise, but never the other way around.
2. You might have read every single book about boxing, but that still doesn't make you a boxer.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#18Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?
Which period are you referring to? According to https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-... this is not the case.
There's a hard line drawn on that chart in the year 2012, as if it's some sort of significant outlier in the data, except that it's not. The upward trend in suicides seems to begin in 2007.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#19Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
“Anti” coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning.
Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you.
Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back.
Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.
Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point.
It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#20Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.
You’ll have to be more specific. What political goals do you think are being accomplished here?
For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings don’t align with YOUR politics doesn’t make the research itself politically motivated, it’s more likely your worldview was politically steeped from the beginning.