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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#391

Post by wharvle »

mrweasel wrote: post #329
johnchristopher wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. People have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for years.

But what do we do with that information? Un-invent social media, ban it? How would such a ban work and what should it cover? At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if i…

Banning dragnet spying and/or making retaining data about people very risky, has some chance of killing algorithm-feed social media (by drying up ad dollars) and would be a good thing to do anyway.

Making companies liable not for content they host or deliver/show to an explicit recipient or set of recipients, but for content they both host and actively elect to promote, would kill the algorithm feed, suggested videos, et c, but not ordinary Internet hosting services or messaging platforms (or even traditional forums!).

Neither is impossible, and either would probably be good to do anyway.

If the core problem is companies shoving shit at you based on what drives "engagement" and with little regard for anything else, those are policies to look at.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#393

Post by photochemsyn »

drewjaja wrote: post #317

Our society is teaching us to seek money, power, intelligence, beauty, bodily satisfaction, all of which will never satisfy us. “If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die…

...all of which will never satisfy us.

Generally I think this is what the advertising world relies on to push consumerism on the public - just buy this product to make yourself more attractive, to get money and power and respect, and if your life is miserable, here is some junk food and alcohol for a brief mood alteration, although it will damage your health, but that's okay, since health care is a profit center and without sick people to feed into it, well, profits would fall. Round and round it goes, generating sick depressed people who fill their homes with useless junk ordered on Amazon.

Breaking out of this mindless consumer cycle is among the best things one can do for one's mental (and physical) health - even if it may 'hurt the economy'.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#394

Post by verteu »

mike_hearn wrote: post #242

This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked. https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by ti…

> It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.

No, there is strong evidence for the teen mental health crisis: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemi...

Brown never denied that -- He argued that there's not much high-quality evidence it's caused by social media. This is clear from the title alone ("The Statistically Flawed Evidence That Social Media Is Causing the Teen Mental Health Crisis").

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#395

Post by dahart »

mrweasel wrote: post #276
mbgerring wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.

That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made saf…

> There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook

I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#396

Post by Podgajski »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #385
Podgajski wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because the mechanism doesn't make much sense - the electromagnetic fields we are now subject to are absolutely tiny compared to the noise from the earth and the sun. How can a 0.1 W (right at the antenna) WiFi router disrupt our brains when the 1000 W/m^2 (hitting the ground, and only counting the visible spectrum) Sun doesn't?

Did we evolve with the polarized pulsed microwave radiation from man-made devices? Or Did we evolve with the non-polarized radiation from the sun?

You cannot compare that. The proof of this is that the FCC has safety regulations against how close you are to the sources. But these were devised with two and 3G technologies. Also, most of the studies are not real world studies, and so they lack many of the key characteristics of our exposure.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...

And make no mistake, I think a lot of people could be positively affected by this type of electromagnetic radiation, unfortunately, I don’t think I’m one of those, however. It’s really mostly about genetics.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#397

Post by ben_w »

CalRobert wrote: post #130
alienicecream wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's what the kids are thinking about, late-stage capitalism and declining social mobility.

I was very worried about climate change as a kid, and still am.

I was worried when I was a kid, now I'm much less worried. Plenty of other things to worry about, and there's still a non-zero risk, but I think there's enough money to be made fixing that particular issue that we'll probably be OK.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#400

Post by crimsoneer »

naasking wrote: post #372
mike_hearn wrote: post #242

This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked. https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by ti…

> Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis. I don't see how you can reach this conclusion when it's very clear in the data that hospitalizations for teens due to self-harm has gone up significantly. Are you suggesting that hospitals are not now or were not previously correctly reporting this data?

Yeah, I'm sceptical but this convinced me. I'm not sure how you get around the hospital data.
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