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

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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

#571

Post by watwut »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #264
watwut wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If anything, parent is saying that staying engaged and not giving up just because an issue came up, is a positive, valuable and, most importantly, not passive at all. In other words, if you can't even deal with the problem you received, how are you even begin to 'improve things' overall? It is not uncharitable interpretation. It is exactly what it means. What the cultures…

Parent statement: >> And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day. Response: > Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as…

Stop lying. This is what you said:

> which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure,

This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.

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

#572

Post by Enginerrrd »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #375
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am willing to agree that it is still more art than science in its current state, but I personally think we are slowly moving towards a replicable mind after all -- a terrifying prospect, because it would truly prove 'free will' is an illusion. It currently seems impossible due to sheer number of factors with overlapping effects. I don't think it is impossible though.

I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad. It would represent a fundamental phase change in the way an individual interacts with the world, which I would wager would be antithetical to effective transmission of the belief. Far more dangerous would be the 90% mark, where understanding of psychological determinism advances to a point wh…

I don't believe in free will at all. I never really did from a physics perspective, but after many years of meditating, I don't believe it at the highest levels of abstraction now either.

I don't understand how that is supposed to change anything at all about how an individual interacts with the world though?

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

#573

Post by revelio »

jeremyjh wrote: post #567
revelio wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the graphs he shows actually inflect earlier, around 2010 or so. This is around the time the media to start systematically hardening its line on all things climate, and the "great awokening" that started flooding the news with claims the world was dominated by systemic hate and -isms. The two are related, both being ideological in nature.

Oh that’s a neat theory. Is there any data to support it or should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio?

There's lots of data, yes. Rozado has many n-gram plots that show this happening around 2010 for some terms and 2012-ish for other terms:

https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd

The huge spikes in terms like inclusion, racist, sexist, climate change, global warming, etc is clear, all starting around either 2010 or 2012 (except for global warming, which spiked a few years earlier and then was replaced almost overnight in 2010 by the vaguer term climate change, which shows massive growth in the last 10 years).

A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.

>> "should I just listen to a fat white man screaming on talk radio"

I thought that would be considered racist fat shaming these days, but I guess it doesn't count if the person you're offending isn't on your team?

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

#574

Post by revelio »

nullfield wrote: post #554
revelio wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.

Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.

That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.

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

#575

Post by revelio »

wizofaus wrote: post #564
revelio wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explicitly don't! Christianity is very clear that whilst everyone is born into sin, Jesus died to cleanse us of that sin and God is forgiving of sinners who repent. In the Christological religions at least, there is always a way back to the good path. You may have to pray for forgiveness, or do a confession. But you can do it. In climatological religion, there is no way to the good path no matter what you do.

You can't ignore the reality that even many streams of Christianity regularly insisted on certain perfectly natural behaviours being "sinful" and worthy of eternal punishment in hell. That surely must have had some effect on the mental health of believers, but there's no real evidence our collective mental health has improved now that the majority of us no longer buy into any sort of doctrine of being born as sinful…

I'm not a Christian anymore, so I might be misrepresenting the religion here, but I think they would say that you only go to hell if you don't repent your sins. And the whole Hell/Satan thing was never a major part of my own Christian upbringing from what I recall, that's a much bigger thing in medieval religion.

As for having a bad effect on mental health, well, the inquisitions and holy wars were pretty mad in retrospect.

Nobody is claiming that climate change is significantly impacting mental health, at least not yet. Even Haidt's data shows an increase over a very small baseline, whether that's significant or not boils down to whether you're talking in relative or absolute terms. But you seem to be talking from the perspective of a mentally healthy person. Obviously, a mentally healthy person doesn't get so upset about climate change they kill themselves, but we risk being circular. A small number of highly susceptible people will fall prey to the narrative of un-cleansable guilt and un-solvable doom, and lose their stability. It's already appearing in news and anecdotal reports.

>> there's little genuine analysis done as to whether the changes really are of any net benefit.

No, of course not. Anyone who tries to do such analysis rigorously has to dive into the data, and if you do that you immediately becomes a skeptic of both claimed solutions and claimed problems, so your views are now unspeakable in polite society. Given that it's inevitable that you're only going to "see" people who aren't doing genuine analysis as a result.

>> It may give some artificial boost in sense of self-worth and short term improvement in mental health but is at best a distraction from what's really needed

Which is what, exactly? Notice how you spend time attacking those who refuse to do what's "really needed" without spelling out what that is, thus engaging in the token gesture of cheap online activism. If you're about to give some absurd policy that boils down to most of the population dying off or living in absolute poverty, and which could only be implemented by a dystopian global dictatorship, then great, you're just proving why most people prefer to engage in what you call token gestures.

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

#576

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

watwut wrote: post #571
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent statement: >> And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day. Response: > Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as…

Stop lying. This is what you said: > which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.

Um. First, I would like you to consider the possibility that you are not accurate and maybe a little too hasty in your judgment.

When you look at the post history, you will note that it is GP that used that quote so accusing me of lying is a little much. If that is the case, It is possible that you may be a little too emotional about this issue to see the argument clearly.

I am willing to agree, but I am not certain I can continue this conversation in good faith when you ascribe quotes to me that are not mine.

I never hid that I have opinions; some of those are strong and maybe even controversial in some ways, but I like clear statements. I would like to point out that you chose to respond to neither of my questions and instead attempted to derail this conversation by attempting to point to inconsistency that.. well.. does not exist.

But even assuming all of the above did not happen. The question becomes: so?

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

#577

Post by Glyptodon »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #524
Glyptodon wrote: post #307

I have mixed thoughts about this. I think there are at least two or more factors and social media is a part of it, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum. The reason I think this is that there seems to be a small minority of people who have the skills and mental models to use social media as a tool without adverse impact, as a well as another minority of people who seem to be able to remain distanced or minimal users of…

anyone who uses the iPad as a babysitter is a terrible parent IMO Do you include a draw/colouring/painting app? That seems OK to me. It is a digital form of colouring books.

I mean using as a babysitter is a specific style of behavior where parents just give kids devices to avoid parenting, not so much dependent on the specific apps. "I'm talking to Jane, go play with the iPad."

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

#578

Post by Draiken »

klooney wrote: post #547
Draiken wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are many ways to make all of this stuff. Many times there are better ways and less harmful ways, but those are basically always less profitable. This is capitalism and the one and only objective is profit. It's never going to be working towards having a sustainable world, getting better stuff, getting less useless stuff, etc. We don't need half the stupid stuff that's being sold to us and we keep buying it…

This is a common but equally silly complaint- people were denuding their islands of trees and hunting animals to extinction long before anything approximating capitalism. Socialism's externality record isn't amazing either. Disagreeing on what things are important is just the human condition.

Sure, but we evolved and now we know better.

Except with the current state of affairs, we know it's the wrong thing to do but still keep doing it in favor of profits.

It makes no sense to compare how things were ages ago (even quite recently, in fact) to where we are now. This kind of dismissal is low effort and deflects the real issue because nobody wants to admit just how bad it is.

For a very recent example, it became public Exxon knew the harm they would be doing to the planet through fossil fuels and they couldn't care less. Gotta increase that shareholder value.

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

#579

Post by ThomPete »

yellowapple wrote: post #181
ThomPete wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era. Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative. Wind and s…

> The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators. You don't need to go that far. Fission and geothermal can work at scale today and largely solve the impending climate trainwreck today . We haven't adopted them in droves not because of some technological limitation, but rather because they're more expensive on balance sheets (which don't…

They don't scale and they don't provide enough energy density to do provide energy for new types of solutions.

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

#580

Post by ThomPete »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #373
ThomPete wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with.

That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence. Got any?

Well provide me with a scientifically proven consequence of climate change and I will tell you how we deal with it.
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