Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by somedude895 » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

frostburg wrote: post #38

voldacar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What political objective is accomplished by not coddling children?

That's the point; children would die otherwise, by the very biological nature of our species. What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is determining the details of what should be allowed to traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.

> is determining the details of what should be allowed

As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove the boundaries that have been established over the past couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at here that are part of that supposed plan to shape society?

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

#132

Post by Gordonjcp » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #112

hasmolo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this glued to devices meme is tired. look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine. i know it seems crazy, but humans reading information is a constant in public, and the only reason you didn't see more of it in the past is that you were part of the group consuming media, while also assigning intellectual value to the fact that a periodical…

look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine. I know the image you have in your mind. I've seen it, too. What you actually mean is "I saw this one picture on social media of a bunch of people on a train all reading newspapers at the same time because war just broke out." Using that as a logical crutch for social media addiction is like the…

I grew up in the 1980s. Everyone sat and read a newspaper or a book on the bus or the train back then.

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

#133

Post by 1827162 » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

brandall10 wrote: post #103

rqtwteye wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think social media amplified trends that were there before. I remember when I came to the US in 2000 it was pretty fashionable to say “I am angry” all the time. And the hatred at politicians was pretty pronounced too. And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups. The internet just made it much worse.…

24 hour cable news, where news became entertainment, definitely sowed the seeds of this. There is a great movie from the 70s called Network that predicted the slide of society in this direction.

And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.

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

#134

Post by frostburg » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

cmilton wrote: post #115

frostburg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about what you're asking, but taking a guess: I think that it's safer to have children raised by a larger amount of figures (primarily the parents, but also grandparents in a multi-generational household, other relatives if they exist, family friends - this would have been other people in the tribe or village traditionally - etc.). Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly unsupervised, inexperien…

I think most would agree that more is better than fewer caretakers. This works well when families are located close geographically, but not so much when spread out. I would also argue, why does the community automatically bear the responsibility for a decision made by two?

They also pay taxes for schools etc. - we're talking about society-wide outcomes. Personally I have no intention of reproducing and even think that a managed but very significant reduction in population would alleviate a lot of issues, but this doesn't mean that I want existing children to be mistreated.

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

#135

Post by pydry » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #77

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.

> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to…

>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.

This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.

The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.

Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

1827162 wrote: post #116

creshal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass. And yet, their generation seems to be the most addicted these days, and the most unhinged when it comes to following conspiracy theories.

Likely because that generation was raised to believe everything they were told, starting from an early age with school, religion, then with television and newspapers, etc. The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. and they learned to think more critically about what they are reading.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by throwaway2847 » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

azangru wrote: post #129

psychphysic wrote: post #21

It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health. I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence. There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality. T…

> Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you. Don't you have to be sufficiently active or prominent on the social media to be attacked? (Yes, I remember the example of some hapless lady who tweeted "hope I won't get aids" before departing to Africa. I don't know how active she had been on twitter, or how typical the subsequent annihilation of her is.)

Definitely not, if you reply to a sufficiently famous person in a way they dislike there's always a risk they'll (in)directly turn their followers against you.

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

#138

Post by AlgorithmicTime » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #106

psychphysic wrote: post #21

It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health. I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence. There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality. T…

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the mid…

[dead]

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

#139

Post by zzbzq » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

knallfrosch wrote: post #15

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #3

Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?

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.

Seems perfectly contradictory to me, "We need to shelter our kids from the big bad social media because they are too fragile to handle it"

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

#140

Post by rayiner » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #106

psychphysic wrote: post #21

It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health. I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence. There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality. T…

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the mid…

> There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the middle.

You can start by pulling back from the obvious rhetorical flourishes. We can acknowledge that social liberals aren’t literally child molesters. At the same time, can you acknowledge that parents in Florida don’t want to put anyone to death, but simply don’t trust what liberal teachers will tell their kids about sexuality?

Like is it possible for you to acknowledge that folks in Florida don’t want to kill sexual minorities, but are also wary of a resurgent sexual revolution that could change the behaviors of kids who aren’t born gay or trans? Like can you seriously deny that there is an emerging trend of sexual identity becoming a form of self expression? https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/health/pronouns-guide-for-par...

It’s instructive to note that society did reach a broadly acceptable middle ground when it came to same-sex marriage. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the science was not well established, radicals wanted to use same sex relationships as a vehicle to deconstruct social norms around gender and marriage more broadly. The shift in the 1990s to refocus on same sex marriage was a deliberate, and in liberal circles controversial change: https://www.salon.com/1998/11/30/cov_30int. And of course that’s the view that won. Obergefell is a paean to traditional marriage that bears little resemblance to how radical academics conceived of sexual orientation either then or now.