131–140 of 263 posts
I'd like to see similar study about the original gateway drug: "24-hour News Channels", which was followed by "24-hour Outrage-News Channels". Seems like we've been building toward this, the interactivity of the internet was the paradigm shift (to use a 90's term). EDIT: I realize it isn't news messing with youths' self-esteem (well, in some cases it is), but it is related in that the media is custom-made to drive en…
Today I disabled Facebook and Instagram. I also removed all shortlinks to various newssites. I want to avoid them as well. Including Reddit . The only thing I am allowed to read is hackernews. I find that one of the few good sources. Even for general news.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it. Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not…
I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed…
In a century, they’ll wonder how we could possibly have kept engaging knowing the harm we were doing to ourselves.
As with all studies in the social sciences, one of two principles apply. First, if the conclusions are counterintuitive or unexpected, then when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not support the conclusions given. Second, if the conclusions reflect things that you believe are true, when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not su…
That's a low-effort, shallow dismissal that doesn't even address anything specific to the article. If you have specific criticism regarding the methodology of this study - which doesn't, prima facie, appear unsound - please let the rest of us participate.
First I'll say that without preregistration of the methodology, there's a lot that is immediately suspicious.
> The researchers built an index based on 15 relevant questions in the NCHA, in which students were asked about their mental health in the past year
Why these 15? What was the "relevance" criteria?
To their credit, they don't just look at a summary metric of "mental health" which would be kind of absurd since the relative weighting is also arbitrary (although that appears to be the main conclusion). The article here notes several axes on which significant differences were found. Why these axes? What about other "mental health" metrics? Did they get better or stay neutral or just have no detectable effect?
Without preregistration it's almost impossible to determine exactly how cherry-picked these differences were, as with a large enough set of potential questions to choose from, you're going to find statistically significant trends on some of them by random chance.
The core methodology is to track the spread of Facebook to different colleges and compare mental health between schools that had Facebook and schools that did not yet have Facebook. This is surprisingly not terrible, but without insight into how the study controlled for the time axis and potential confounding variables about the non-random selection of schools for the rollout, it's difficult to say more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will take a stab. Mind you, I have not even clicked on the article, much less read it or know what the methodology is. Here goes ---- "The have used a correlational model, not a causal model. There are several confounding variables the paper doesn't consider, hence it is not proven from the evidence that Facebook has a negative impact "
In most fields of study you can't really perform double-blind experiments. We know that smoking is linked to cancer through decades of correlational studies and careful analysis of confounding factors, for example. The article discusses how the study looked at different universities during the same time period, some of which had access to facebook and some of which didn't, and discovered that in the first case there…
Some were surely acting in their own personal financial interests but I'm also certain that a lot of it was more nuanced and personal. People need to think of themselves as, for the most part, good people who do mostly good things. Knowingly contributing to something that makes life much worse for many people doesn't align with that and they will need to deny it. I know if you polled phillip morris employees about cancer in the late 60s after the link was confirmed you'd hear a lot about correlation and uncertainty.
HN isn't a random slice of the population. A lot of us here work in this domain or on similar products. There are certainly people in this comment section who directly worked on the core facebook product being discussed. They need to think of themselves as good still, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will take a stab. Mind you, I have not even clicked on the article, much less read it or know what the methodology is. Here goes ---- "The have used a correlational model, not a causal model. There are several confounding variables the paper doesn't consider, hence it is not proven from the evidence that Facebook has a negative impact "
FWIW, the article claims the exact opposite > While many studies have found a correlation between the use of social media and various symptoms related to mental health, so far, it has been challenging to ascertain whether social media was actually the cause of poor mental health. By applying a novel research method, researchers have now succeeded in establishing such a causality But doesn't elaborate on the new metho…
They looked at the mental health (as measured by self-reported surveys) among schools over time and cross-referenced that with the rollout of Facebook over time. So they could compare the change in mental health at schools the received Facebook access and compare it to the change in mental health at schools that did not receive Facebook access at the same time.
The methodology appears to be fairly novel and does isolate them from several reverse-causation biases, as it is difficult to imagine that the rollout of Facebook was influenced by factors that led to the decline of mental health in student bodies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will take a stab. Mind you, I have not even clicked on the article, much less read it or know what the methodology is. Here goes ---- "The have used a correlational model, not a causal model. There are several confounding variables the paper doesn't consider, hence it is not proven from the evidence that Facebook has a negative impact "
In most fields of study you can't really perform double-blind experiments. We know that smoking is linked to cancer through decades of correlational studies and careful analysis of confounding factors, for example. The article discusses how the study looked at different universities during the same time period, some of which had access to facebook and some of which didn't, and discovered that in the first case there…
Going back to your specific comments. Clearly the universities were not randomly assigned the treatment and control. And the actual number of independent sample sizes is extremely unlikely to give stat sig results at the single percentage digit impact shown. And no matter what they do, for something as complex as mental health, listing out all the confounding factors is hopeless - unlike lung cancer where you are literally sucking tar into your lungs and the sample sizes and effects are huge. Its a useful observational study, but it is ridiculous to call it a proof.
> We know that smoking is linked to cancer through decades of correlational studies and careful analysis of confounding factors, for example.
Yes, it took decades, when there is no proper control set. There are work arounds like backdoor and front door criteria, but yeah - it will take decades of work and looking inside the "black box".
As with all studies in the social sciences, one of two principles apply. First, if the conclusions are counterintuitive or unexpected, then when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not support the conclusions given. Second, if the conclusions reflect things that you believe are true, when you look closer, you will find that the methodology is garbage and that it does not su…
That's a low-effort, shallow dismissal that doesn't even address anything specific to the article. If you have specific criticism regarding the methodology of this study - which doesn't, prima facie, appear unsound - please let the rest of us participate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a low-effort, shallow dismissal that doesn't even address anything specific to the article. If you have specific criticism regarding the methodology of this study - which doesn't, prima facie, appear unsound - please let the rest of us participate.
Unfortunately I was not able to locate a preprint for the paper itself, so we only have this article summarizing. First I'll say that without preregistration of the methodology, there's a lot that is immediately suspicious. > The researchers built an index based on 15 relevant questions in the NCHA, in which students were asked about their mental health in the past year Why these 15? What was the "relevance" criteria…
Nonetheless I remain blithely confident that this study is not going to be the one to break the mold.
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/256787/1/1801812535....