Screens might be as bad for mental health as potatoes
wired.com
wired.com
The article does not assert that there is ANY correlation between mental health and potatoes.
The closest they come was "about as...which is to say, hardly at all".
.001 is about as much as 0, or about as much as -.001.
It was a flippant remark, and probably better interpreted as "screen time may be good or bad for your mental health, depending on many other factors, like potatoes may be good or bad for your [mental?] health, depending on many other factors."
> The result was a series of visualizations that map the wide gamut of potential effects researchers could detect in the three repositories, and they reveal several important things: One, that small changes in analytical approach can lead to dramatically different findings along that spectrum. Two, that the correlation between technology use and well-being is negative. And three, that this correlation is very, very small, explaining—at most—0.4 percent of the variation in adolescent well-being.
> To put it in perspective, the researchers compared the link between technology use and adolescent well-being to that of other factors examined by the large-scale data sets. "Using technology is about as associated with well-being as eating potatoes," Przybylski says. In other words: hardly at all. By the same logic, bullying had an effect size four times greater than screen use. Smoking cigarettes? 18 times. Conversely, getting enough sleep and eating breakfast were positively associated with adolescent well-being at a magnitude 44 and 30 times that of technology use, respectively.
How close is X to 0? How close is Y to 0?
Could X be 0? Could Y be 0? Could Y be .001? Could Y be -.001?
And that all feels like casting a wide net anomaly hunting, rather than hypothesis testing, but that's probably not relevant at this point.
Or even if my son is (well in scratch) is that the same as watching transformers?
I worked on a stats app. We referred to the problem of finding correlations from data as "the green jelly beans problem" after https://xkcd.com/882/ . There are techniques to deal with it like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction .