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Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

nytimes.com

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Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#521

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

monkpit wrote: post #461
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct. The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to…

> School shootings […] are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. Do you have any sources you can cite? What exactly makes you say that the Edweek numbers are inflated or distorted? (I am genuinely curious.)

Thanks for being curious!

You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.

Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#522

Post by wonderwonder »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #520
wonderwonder wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are in elementary school. I started my kids in boxing when in 1 week my youngest was sucker punched while jogging in P.E. and my oldest was put in a choke hold from behind for no reason by a bigger kid. They didn't fight back because they were afraid of getting in trouble. So even without fighting back they can get hurt. Told them I was putting them in boxing and that no one has the right to touch you. Some o…

Escalating introduces dangerous variables. I’m sorry your school is rife with bullying but honestly, the correct move in these cases is to just run away. Like I said, making a move to continue the fight prolongs the risk you are taking for a bad fall that could break your neck. Its all too easy.

Respectfully disagree. If you spend your life running away it changes your psyche. It changes the way you interact with the world, fear becomes the driving emotion. As my dad, who used to lead special forces groups used to say, it "leaves little grey marks on your soul". As long as the odds are not against you, stand and fight. You do whatever you think is right though, I understand your point and where you are coming from.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#523

Post by arolihas »

dingnuts wrote: post #310
badpun wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple - Brooklyn just became a trendy place in the meantime. And so, of course it's overpriced. Smart people don't overpay for things - the solution is just to live somewhere else. 99.9% of places are not trendy and thus not overpriced. There are thousands of cities in the US, and maybe 10-20 of them are so popular that everyone wants to live there. Of course the prices in those places are going to be crazy - y…

> 99.9% of places are not trendy and thus not overpriced. IDK man I've seen rents and land prices skyrocket in places like Franklin NC. You know what's in Franklin NC? Nothing. I don't have an explanation for that, and I don't think it's limited to trendy places

Shelter has become trendy I guess.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#524

Post by pxoe »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #440
pxoe wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

teens won't just 'want' privacy, they will get it, one way or another. and if it means excluding other people (like parents) from their communication loops, then so be it. thinking that 'you can let them know that you read their little messages, and that takes care of some things', or 'sure, they may want privacy, but what will they really do?'(literally anything incl. getting a burner phone lol), is just unrealistic…

Not everyone has such a combative relationship with their parents as you apparently had. It it is possible to be firm on dangers, still be understanding and calm, and let them have face-to-face conversations with privacy... even a beer once in a while or whatever else harmless thing that might excite them in other ways. Pick your battles in other words.

talking about privacy is different from imposing reduced privacy on someone. so i'm not sure why you're bringing that up like 'that's the thing that's been talked about all along, and it's not bad' (and it isn't, conversations like that can be good, lest they end with a 'and that's why we're monitoring every word you say in chats on a phone', which is the, not even so much 'bad' part per se, but it's just gonna have 'unintended, lasting consequences'), and throwing that in along with a wrong assumption about my life. that kind of 'well damn, not everybody had it that bad, geez, what are you complaining about' shit also just sounds like victim blaming (or rather, target? though, imposed surveillance can get to the point where it's so overt, saying someone's a 'victim' might not even be a stretch), which is also another important aspect to this topic.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#525

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

listenallyall wrote: post #375
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be me. With adults out of the way, I learned to be self-sufficient and I learned how to navigate complex social situations on my own. In short, I learned how to think. Whatever stuff in my life worked out well - I can trace it all to that. My 5 kids had always-present parenting (because independent growth became effectively illegal+impossible). Being it's such a counterproductive situation, it required strictn…

You're a parent of 5 adult children who all live under the same roof as you? Honestly I don't know whether to congratulate you (my kids all love me so much and all get along) or commiserate (none of my kids are independent).

We all get on really well but they are better people than can be attributed to my parenting.

FWIW there's a rule in play that success is kids'; failure is parents'. I can't do their hard work of growing up but I could surely sabotage it.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#526

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

inconceivable wrote: post #467
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd maybe put the doubling of rent every decade up there at the top as the thing that causes the most mental health harm. I can't say you're wrong. In my formerly inexpensive state, we went from 1 typical income to survive (1993) to 4 typical incomes. Just in 2021, we had to absorb a 70% increase in rent - and we were lucky. State 'fixes' to home/biz insurance are quadrupling policy costs while mandating more peopl…

so... florida?

I praise your appraisement skills.

Of note on the auto insurance: We carry fat comp/med but no liability. Any damage to our cars from weather is fully on us and not the ins company. This means in our case, the f.u. FL increase can not be reasonably said to be proportional to our risk of weather damage.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#527

Post by basisword »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #464
basisword wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels to me like smoking. A generation was there at the start of social media, got addicted and now can’t quit. Their kids see them doing it and they do the same. Eventually they’ll realise the negative side of it and they’ll try to stop their kids from getting in to it (but won’t quit themselves).

I suspect the analogy between this kind of media consumption and smoking will prove to be far more analogous than we'd like to admit.

[flagged]

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#528

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

escapedmoose wrote: post #430
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct. The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to…

What’s the actual K-12 chance though? If you’re saying that the cumulative 0.7% chance is incorrect, can you provide a more accurate figure?

# K-12 kids killed (specifically in this case shot dead) at school in the U.S. in a given year / # K-12 kids total who go to school

This: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollme...

Makes it look like there are 55,548,000 K-12 kids enrolled in school in the U.S. in 2020

This: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 Makes it look like there are between 12 and 35 homicides of kids 5-18 years of age at school per year in the years 1992-2019.

The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.

Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.

Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).

Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.

And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).

For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.

(https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-y... for death by drowning)

Edit: this data makes it seem like 11.5 or so deaths per year rather than 24 (because it's shootings specifically, I think), and gives more colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#529

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

badpun wrote: post #306
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social media and phones have had a huge negative impact on the amount of time young people spend together in person and have amplified the stakes of one's social life Social media and phones are what youth had left, after adults systemically wiped out every inch of their development environment. I'm an early genx; the last generation to grow up free of constant supervision. I went everywhere by myself and learned c…

> That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions. I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states? You'd think the states self-describing as "freedom loving" wouldn…

> I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states?

It is fairly well the same everywhere in the US, red & blue states alike. There's no shortage of adults who are passionately stupid about kids w/o adults around. Maybe you educate one but there are millions more behind them.

At least one state passed a right-to-roam law. However, that didn't stop LEO from endlessly bullhorning false stranger risks or stop news orgs from thoughtlessly parroting it. The life-changing harm John Walsh has done to millions of kids is incalculable.

Re: Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns

#530

Post by anigbrowl »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #418
kredd wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.

That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct. The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to…

This is an asinine argument, as a per-capita comparison with just about any other country shows. I'm not endorsing the Edweek numbers (which were brought into this discussion by someone asserting that school shootings are not a big deal).

I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.

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