Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness | Hacker News Reader

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

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

377 pointsYuukiRey536 comments

I think it's the total visibility that's causing mental illness. There is no space where you can be with your friends, screw up, and not have it become known to everyone in your peer group. There's little space to make mistakes. No space to be yourself. You are under the watchful gaze of your friends, i.e. peer surveillance, nearly all of the time. Which induces stifling conformity.

Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up exerting social control over your life through social media.

So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.

On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those mistakes.

I left facebook a long time ago because it just felt like low value interaction. None of my friends on there were people I actually spent time with, and the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people. I never specifically experienced the peer surveillance you describe, but I believe it's real or that social media has made people believe it's real (to a degree worthy of concern)

I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't relate to your perspective, but I don't doubt it, because to me social media is a cornucopia of ways to make yourself crazy and I believe that everyone that has a "why I think social media is making us worse people" rant is probably correct to some degree and highlighting a piece of a spectrum of horrible.

> the whole thing seemed to just bring out the worst sides of people

I wonder if it's still the case though. It's been years I haven't seen anyone arguing on my quiet feed. Maybe people have learned? or just deserted it?

Nowadays, the really toxic place is Twitter, orders of magnitude worse than FB has even been in my opinion.

Twitter is first with the news and political hot takes. Those and memes boil down to Facebook posts and reshares.

It’s pretty similar to what was the 4chan to Reddit to Facebook. But politics became more polarizing and every government official was giving their hot take. Instant short replies. I guess all those seconds of engagement add up.

Twitter is easy to sign up for, doesn't really require any sort of actual human details, and runs entirely on essentially short text blurbs that are easy to automate, scan, parse, and track.

Retweets, ratios, and bog-standard sentiment analysis also give immediate feedback as to success of a tweet. Real easy to tweak a bot to produce content, or to game the system -- and that's before GPT-4.

Facebook at least requires you to pretend you're a real person with a real face and real friends.

> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.

I think this is truthy, but I abandoned social media a long time ago and my experience is different. At first, I lost touch with a lot of people and my world became small. After some time people found me (I still run a blog, so I'm discoverable) and now folks will call and visit with me. I get a lot more authentic conversations with folks because they know I'm not going to put them on blast. I still have my judgements and my opinions like anyone, but those, I think, are easier for people to deal with.

Maybe the real equation is that if the shallow, judgemental connection is made available, people will reach for it because it's easy, and palatable, like junk food. But sooner or later they need a real meal and wouldn't you rather be that occasional quality interaction rather than the quantity interaction?

I think it's the addicive nature of social media is causing mental illness. Lack of sleep, lack of time to just let the mind wander (=lack of time to actually lift your gaze from the small and take care of your bigger things in life).

It can of course be a mixture of several effects.

It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your "friends" here are in effect not allowing you to be yourself. And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you) if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.

>no space to be yourself

not only there are multiple spaces to be yourself within, you can be yourself in different ways and under different identities. there's "side profiles", "finstas", etc., there's more flexibility and more ways to express yourself, across all different sides of you. like, if someone thinks that people just use one identity and hang out around a certain circle of people in a certain space (or set of spaces), that just doesn't align with reality. people make side pages, pseudonyms and identities, with those having different circles of people they interact with, and different audiences, within one space/platform or across multiple different ones. just like, a handful of apps, insta, twitter, tiktok, discord, all may have different circles and dynamics. and it's fine - and it works - because irl spaces/circles/identities, do play out in a similar way. (like, differences between home/friends/school/work/public/etc.)

If this is the case, is this reflected in the suicide rate of small, nosy towns? Small towns are notorious for everyone knowing everyone else’s business.

Suicide rates do go up the lower the population density. I can't say it's attributable to this dynamic, though.

> suicide rates increase as population density decreases and an area becomes more rural.

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.htm...

Entrapment, and a sense that there is no path to a bright future. Both socially and economically.

There’s a difference, though, between everyone having access to what you have done, and people in your circle of trust gossiping about you to people outside of it. First, you can theoretically figure out the gossip and exclude them. Second, the gossip gossips about things _they_ find interesting, not about things random bored trolls find juicy. Thus, the odds of your faux pas exposing you to abuse are naturally lower.

In other words, “small towns have no secrets” is an oversimplification.

I don't think this is unique to social media. Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized. It would be even worse because there's no way to find people who might be different like you, unlike today where there are forums and other websites.

> Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s before people even had cellphones in class and you'd definitely end up ostracized

I think that's a part of OP's point. After that, if you wanted, you could go away to college and buy normal clothes and reinvent yourself completely.

Nowadays, if you're a person who agrees for whatever reason is a shitheel, you're that same shitheel forever, and the inertia required to overcome that is greater.

You're right in the sense that the internet also allows to find sympathetic others, but that doesn't shake the stigma, merely exposes it to more people. (Which has the added benefit of contributing to polarization.)

Why do you think that? Most people don't have the energy to keep track of people they disagreed with once in the past.

If I ask 100 people who Gary Johnson is, most of them will remember him as "The Aleppo guy." If I type "Gary Johnson" into Google (even incognito), the first auto-complete is "Gary Johnson Aleppo." Nevermind that he's an accomplished politician, mountain climber, author, etc., he's broadly defined by his one big public gaffe.

Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.

If you remember Lindy Chamberlain at all, it's probably as the "Dingos ate my baby" lady, whose name was dragged through the mud and went to prison for years before it was revealed likely that dingos had almost certainly eaten her baby.

Chris Jeffries was questioned in the murder of Joanna Yates.

Richard Jewell. Fatty Arbuckle. Bruce Ismay. Rebecca Black. Kevin Carter. Monica Lewinsky. The McDonald's Coffee Lady (Stella Liebeck). If you remember any of these names, it's almost certainly for something bad they were accused of doing.

I've seen studies that show that because our brains are our foremost self-defense mechanisms, they're constantly looking for bad patterns to avoid, so we remember the bad things about people much more readily than we remember the good. That we do so for faraway people with whom we'll never likely have any contact is likely low on the utility scale, but we mostly haven't adapted to avoiding it.

Actors who manage to land parts doing crime scene reenactments for true crime docudramas tend to regret them, because people at the grocery see the actors and forget they were watching television and assume he's a serial murderer.

We rely on our intuitions so much when meeting new people, and our brains hold onto negative impressions so strongly that even though you think you don't have the energy to keep track of it, the brain actually does. Perhaps not just over a disagreement, but if you form a negative connotation around a picture of someone internet infamous, cognitive bias ensures that you'll likely dislike them if you ever actually meet and they'll have to actively work to overcome that negative preconception despite us having formed that preconception based on perhaps as little as 10 seconds of their life portrayed out of context.

If you do not dislike anyone that you haven't met (e.g., a politician, or polarizing celebrity like Logan Paul or Joe Rogan or Elon Musk) then congrats, you're in the (presumably) low percentage of people who don't have this affliction. But I think it's a pretty big stretch to say that "most" don't.

> Howard Dean's political career was ruined and is largely defined by one poorly timed on-air scream after it was mocked by late night comedy hosts.

Amazing to think that Donald Trump could make gaff after gaff and still, inexplicably, be considered electable. Dean made one dumbass howl and got shit-canned. MSM in action.

Also, a shame about Fatty Arbuckle, dude even got an apology from the court but still got his career ruined.

I think being able to find others like you is actually what really sends mental health spiraling.

Back in the day, if you were a pathetic loser, that’s all you were, and that’s how you had to navigate life. This would force you to take an honest look at yourself and see why you don’t fit in to larger society and maybe if you should try to be different. And eventually you might become a version of yourself a bit more acceptable to society. Even if you knew deep down you were a pathetic loser, at least now you knew how to cooperate and be agreeable with others and even make friends that are different from you and not total losers. In time you would gain wisdom about life and be content with yourself.

But now? It’s quick to find so many others exactly like you, and you can feed off each others thoughts and words of encouragement, no matter how twisted. Eventually you see everyone not like you as an enemy, rather than as a person whose friendship and acceptance you seek to earn. You lose your connection to the rest of society, you find yourself increasingly unable to relate, and find yourself spending your days seething with hate at the society that you feel has nothing to offer you, filled with people you’ll never give a fuck about.

I think in most cases this isn't true (who cares how niche your hobbies or style are), but when it comes to internet mental health discussion communities there definitely is a double edged sword IMO. Depends on the community and person, but I suspect you're right in the case of e.g. finding others who are depressed, there's a lot of overshoot in the reaction to stigma in some of these groups, to the point it encourages giving into some pretty bad lifestyle loops.

I'd say that's not necessarily bad, more of a double edged sword. Many marginalized groups do need these kinds of support. They fall into the categories like 'I like playing games instead of sports, so what', 'I like watching niche foreign shows with subtitles'. At the end of the day, many ppl do benefit from increased connections. Many groups(both negative and positive) wont even exist with current technology.

Personally, it's a net positive for me.

That only explains the poor mental health of terrible people with shitty beliefs though. What about people with parents who managed to socialize them well but yet are horribly depressed due to the environment being in shambles? The environment has always been mistreated by those who make more money from that mistreatment, from way before the Internet was a smidge of an idea.

>I don't think this is unique to social media.

Not just that, it's one of the biggest themes in modern American fiction before social media. Most of PK Dick's work deals with the opressiveness of middle class culture, mental illness, people who don't fit in and how these things overlap. You had Fight Club or Taxi Driver on violence and isolation particular of men, or American Beauty on the conformist and almost totalitarian nature of the suburbs, etc. It's been a major topic in American culture for decades.

This is true, but there were those of us who embraced being the ostracized. Being the 'weird' one (worse words used) made me who I am today.

Wouldn't you just be pushed into dressing the same way? Is it really problematic?

Getting into fights over it wasn't the greatest experience, does that count as problematic?

> Try dressing different from the norm in the 1990s

Social media is small town gossip, at scale.

> So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah.

We seem to have different friends. Maybe it's a generational thing? Very few of my friends are highly active on social media. At least, not as far as I can tell, because I rarely check the feeds.

You can always just delete your account. Granted, that's easier for me to say as an adult than it would be for your average peer-pressured teenager. But that's where parents can help.

I think eventually, teens will see social media as "uncool" in the same way as they see smoking cigarettes as "uncool" (in some countries). It takes a lot of social propagandizing to popularize that idea, but we did it with cigarettes and we can do it with social media.

We need to make being off the grid cooler than being on it. Privacy is cool!

I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually. It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away, as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than the benefits.

However not being on social media can have real-world consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.

There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the children that way and also make it more difficult for adult authority figures to interfere with their lives.

My 6yo daughter had to create a login for various online things recently (e.g., code.org to keep track of her progress). I don't exactly when or where they taught her this at school, but she absolutely refused to share any of her personal information in any way. She spent a good 30 minutes trying to make up a handle to use that she liked but didn't include any reference to her name, her initials, anything about her birth month or day (I'd suggesting adding the day of the month she was born as a suffix so she'd remember it given all her initial name preferences seems to be taken already), etc.

I was very impressed that they seem to have this conditioned into them so young, and to a level of importance that exceeded even my own paranoia about doing it properly.

One of Haidt's points is that you can't escape by deleting your account, because everyone else is still online. Suppose you're a teenage girl. The gossip mill about you is still going to be doing the rounds on social media, so the cyberbulling can't be stopped whether or not you're participating. If anything, being the strange outcast by refusing to go online will inflame things. That's one reason why a ban for those below 16 or 18 is a good idea.

You say that but it's a bit tough to care if you don't see it happen. It's possible for everyone here to be the subject of a meme somewhere of a picture taken without consent. However, it just feels tough to care unless you actually see the meme and the reactions of people to it.

The difference between some completely random person taking a picture and your circle of friends is that it's very unlikely for the former to reach anyone you know, where as with the latter it's a guarantee.

But then it would be brought to their attention? And they can respond?

If it's never brought to their attention, it's pointless to worry about.

As a parent. It's a hard topic. And not black and white.

For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part of the puzzle.

Consider a few things:

1. The percentage of households with kids has gradually declined over time, while the percentage of retirees has gone up. So you just generally have an older population. Not everyone lives in a neighborhood where kids can roam and likely some other, known, parent will keep an eye on them.

2. Tolerance for children (esp teenagers) IMO has declined. Understandably, they... can be obnoxious :). There used to be more IRL activities for teens. I've seen, however, even movie theaters don't want ANY minors there without a parent. There's not a shopping mall to drop them off at. And the pandemic has REALLY hurt this.

3. The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever good college / do well in life, they need to have their time spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.

Combining these, society, for a myriad of reasons, doesn't have a lot of opportunities for teenagers to truly be independent. And that too has been cited as a cause of mental health issues (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309101330.h...).

It's a doom spiral too, the fewer kids that are free roaming, the less likely your own kid, when kicked out of the house, will find friends to play with. The less likely other parents will be conducive to your kid knocking on their door, etc etc.

So without kids roaming the streets, how do they connect with their friends? They use some kind of screen / video games / social media / etc. And depriving them of this can mean limiting an outlet of some degree of independence.

Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes.

Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social / independence outlet?

I think not enough people here are understanding the distinction between a communication tool (eg. discord), doom-scrolling platform like tiktok, and video games.

A discord server can be very beneficial for your kids and allow them to coordinate activities. A lot of cool experiences I had in high school and friendships were a direct result of MSN Messenger. A shared multiplayer server like minecraft is also a great way to make friends and learn some social skills. I don't think it's as good as a physical sport activity, but it's far better than a lot solo hobbies traditionally considered "good" for them.

The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, especially going into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities.

If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's going to obscure the social media influence on mental health outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate the two.

>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect.

I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.

In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).

I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best.

The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.

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.

Video games are a sore subject in my house... I grew up with them and I turned out arguably okay (healthy, employable, sociable, etc). But my wife thinks they are the bane of society. And it wasn't until recently that I realized how much the "endgame" of video games has shifted since my childhood in the 90s. Back then, it seemed like the majority of games had an actual end, or they continued to get progressively painfully harder, or both. The number of mainstream games that went on 'forever' (and encouraged you to keep playing) seemed much lower. Now it seems like it's quite the opposite, and of course its the addicting, never-ending, always-online games that our kids and their friends want to play.

For now I'm mostly letting my kids play on one of those mini Super Nintendos with a bunch of built-in games, which they always eventually get tired of and decide on their own to go do something else. When it's Minecraft... I basically have to peel it out of their hands.

yes, things have definitely changed for video games in the past few years.

Loot boxes and the concept of being peer-pressured into paying money for trendy skins is not something that existed when I grew up. TBH, I think many concepts that are popular in AAA games today should require robust 18+ (or even 21+) ID verification to be allowed to use them. I generally never like the idea to banning things for everyone, but we can at least make it a bit harder for kids to access them.

Minecraft is one of the extremely few addictive games I wouldn't be too worried about if I was raising kids but I would verify what type of server/maps they are using. They get to build things and interacts with other people and last time I checked they had relatively few dark patterns (no gambling, loot boxes, paying for trendy skins, pay-to-win, etc.). I hope it is still the same today.

I have a collection of MS DOS games that my kids sometimes play too, precisely because they are the games with a single player mode and an actual end.

Strongly agree, but the challenge is that it is not a hard and fast distinction within a single product/app. Take Snapchat for example (popular with the under 18 crowd). It is both a messaging tool to communicate with friends (great) and it also has a ton of other doom scroll/UGC feed services. I'm not sure what the break down in time and profits for the two services are, but I suspect that they make good money from the doom scroll stuff so it is hard for their executive leadership to be ethical on this issue. I would personally be very supportive if the Government would take measures to protect people under 18 from feeds without restricting access to messaging. Such a law will require a bit of subtlety in how it works.

Yep. Even for video games in my teens I created and led a clan. It was very social and constructive for me.

This is the inevitable conclusions of stranger danger and car-based suburbanization.

When people only access the world via car and avoid walking around, they never build familiarity with their own neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for, are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.

Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income households, the only location where children were safe and tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds dystopian even as I type it out.

Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for this travesty to take place.

People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter to the built infrastructure.

___

I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get to know your neighbors.

The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in leaving their younger children under their supervision, in return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent their time.

North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.

Suburbs and cars already existed 60 years ago, and that was before cell phones for coordinating meetups.

Well 60 years ago was the 60s and suburbanization only started taking off in the 50s. I don't think OP is claiming suburbanization had this effect instantly.

This doesn't explain why teenage girls are suffering from increased mental health issues not only in the USA, but also in other Anglosphere countries, Nordic countries... (etc. ?)

What city?

Great points. I was just in Spain (Madrid) and noticed teenagers playing in parks and even on swings etc along with small children. I never see that in American parks, never. I don't know the mental happiness of teenagers in Spain/Madrid in general but my wife and I thought it was interesting.

Not to contradict your point (which I agree with!), but I as someone who was recently an American teenager I think you might be happy to know that me and my friends used to quite enjoy going to the park and playing on the swingsets! Though we were certainly the exception, not the rule.

Good to hear. I would love to see more of it.

Reading the posts here I can say this seems to be an American problem. Kids here in Europe are still way more fucked up then in the 90s but still the states seem like a shithole of loneliness for kids.

> The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever good college / do well in life, they need to have their time spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.

This is the big one, in conjunction with other comments about how there's "no tolerance for failure" anymore. You have to be on track to be a top tier performer by the time you're 10 or else you will never make it back up (or at least that's how a lot of people feel). Plus there's a sense that either you make it to the top, or you might as well be at the bottom, because the middle class is rapidly vanishing.

The pressure is higher, and starts younger, than ever before.

As already pointed out on the other blog posts, pressure to "get into whatever good college" can't be the explanation when it is only affecting a statistically insignificant minority : even in the USA, roughly half of people don't go to college, and roughly the other half is getting accepted into one that is not hard to get into.

> Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes. Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social / independence outlet?

Haidt says male use of social media in the form of gaming is categorically different to Instagram/Snapchat/Tiktok-type social media use. Because that social activity is less about performing for the camera and bullying and social comparisons, so he doesn't see it to be a problem in need of a ban.

> my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server.

Maybe a little off-topic, but I think both choices made by your kid are good if not the best.

Discord is relatively a private place with specific usage (chat and game). The social pressure it creates should be far less than what's been created by a "proper" public-publishing social media network such as TikTok or Instagram. On top of that, a small friend circle might have natural tendency to guard against outsiders.

On the Minecraft side, assuming it's just a server where your kid and his friends play on, then it should have the same effect as a small friend circle. Which means far less unexpected attack (less chance of generating hate) while keeping the benefit of sharing their creations/creativity with others.

Of course, you still have to know your kid and his friend to ensure the safety of the entire circle. But that's far more controllable than just letting your kid free-playing on TikTok Instagram etc (and get hurt by a total stranger who don't gives a damn care).

> For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part of the puzzle.

Blood hell. Kids will be like zoo exhibits of the last of their species. Seems in everyone's benefit that they are well-socialized, street smart, well-educated, AND not make virtually the same mistakes everyone else are making. We can rapidly go from the myth of "overpopulation" to population crash in as short as a generation.

I wonder if some of the lack of teenager tolerance has to do with larger congregations of teens due to social media. When I was young with no cell phone it was a non-trivial exercise to get a few friends to coordinate to meet and go to a movie.

Now you can start with 4 or 5 people, and if their friends and friends of friends start to get looped in then you have a larger group. Now instead of 0 or 1 obnoxious kids in a group, you may have 3-4 obnoxious ones and a much larger group.

Before cell phones, we didn't worry about making group plans. Everyone just went to the movies or the mall or the Taco Bell parking lot and everyone else went to.

Excuse me we came here to use data to dog on social media not solve actual problems.

It sounds like you have a very healthy relationship with your son!

A lot of this rings true but is this a theory that explains a sharp bend in 2012?

There is no sharp bend in 2012. I can easily interpret it as an gradual increase more from 2010 or so. Eyeballing charts is not science.

Call it whatever you like, it still has to be explained for a potential cause to be viable.

Not necessarily. It depends on whether this increase is just natural long term variance. The charts Haidt shows are very truncated. Data about suicides exists for far longer than the lines he shows.

If you ask 10 different people why they are depressed, you'll get 10 different answers. This illustrated why I think the scientific method is the wrong way to go about understanding the human mind.

Also, if you ask a depressed person why they are depressed, they may not know exactly why they are depressed. I spent my entire high school years depressed. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated college before I realized the reason why I was depressed: it was because I had abusive parents. If you had asked me in high school why I'm depressed I would have said something like "I'm a bad person but I have no reason why". At the time I thought my parents treated me like I was a bad person was secondary to the actual problem.

If you really want insight on what makes the human mind depressed, then ask people who have overcame their depression. The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data". Everything has to be on a pie chart of a line graph or something like that. Every "study" has to be on a grand scale and then averaged together to make a single conclusion.

The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable. You can perform a "study" on a sample of people and get a result, and then replicate that exact same study on the exact same sample of people at a later time, and still get a different result. In order for the scientific method to be applicable, you have to be able to get the exact same result each time you replicate the study. This is not possible in psychology.

This is just objectively not true. Population-level data has been used to establish all sorts of things about psychological disorders. You mention your experience of parental abuse causing depression: it absolutely does! And that relationship was established unequivocally decades ago by showing the correlation between adverse childhood events and the development of depression.

One of your specific complaints is that depressed people do not report the causes of their depression very accurately. This is also true! The unreliability of depressed people is emphasized in the diagnostic criteria, and a good psychologist will probe for other underlying issues. But researchers absolutely can identify causes of depression by supplementing self-reports with objective data.

> The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data".

Yeah, that's how science works. By collecting evidence you can make descriptive statements about the world. If psychologists didn't present data, they would be instead be rightly criticized for presenting data.

It sort of seems like you jump from the poor accuracy of depressed people's self reports to dismissing the entire field of psychology. Humans are complicated and messy, but we do know a ton about psychological disorders.

For what it's worth, I was also reacting to this assertion:

> The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

This was not my experience, and hasn't been the experience of others I know who have been depressed. The condition is often caused by an acute stressor, but in my case it was caused by a lack of social interaction and exercise during the pandemic. Trying to identify the "cause" of my feelings wasn't helpful because they weren't rational - instead I had to get out of bed, exercise, eat, and socialize until the episode cleared.

It’s saddening to hear about your years of depression. Parental abuse traumatizes deeply, and while I may not feel the same pain like you, I can imagine it is destroying life completely. I hope you can receive my and other people’s compassion and won’t relapse into depression.

I would still like to give some response on your content in hopes that you can benefit from it.

Psychology, or the part of what is accessible to the non-academic public, and Clinical Psychotherapy are related but different fields. Psychology alone can be very disappointing to people in pain - I can relate, and shared your sentiment, as I was in pain back then, too. Since I dug deep into the academic literature of Clinical Psychotherapy and the books for the general public, I realized I was just looking in the wrong corner of the library.

Compare Psychology being talking about what a nail is, to Clinical Psychotherapy being talking about how to construct a hammer and hammer the nail correctly into the wall. It’s related but not the same. And only one is really useful for us if our goal is to hang a beautiful painting on the wall.

Hope you find some inspiration from this. Whenever it comes back, please remember to get help quickly before the wounds get septic and require much more difficult intervention. There are good people out there.

You cannot rely on self-reporting as an accurate way to diagnose someone. You need to do single subject studies and doing a sample studies for this is obviously not the right way to go about it. Data collection is very important to understand human behaviour.

While some psychologists might not be aware of this (like the Reason criticism suggests... though mostly has the overworked angle), it seems to be almost insulting to suggest that researchers at his level are not ?

You'd be surprised how niche this sort of discussion is in neuropsych research. Is it because researchers aren't thinking enough about the big picture or because the NIH is incompetent and the researchers just go along with what they need to get funding? Idk, but either way it's not great. I suspect this problem exists in a lot of sciences but psychiatry in particular seems to have overcorrected for some of its less rigorous history.

That said, I don't think it's correct to say the scientific method can't apply. We absolutely have to be more careful about averaging over many people with different actual disease but the same current shitty label, and we also have to be better about looking at longitudinal signals. But there are ways to do this in a more scientific manner (e.g. involving well-defined testable predictions).

I agree that as part of this transitory period (especially with the sample sizes that most psych studies can feasibly get) there should be more synergy between qualitative human-focused approaches and what the by the book science people are doing. It's unfortunate how far behind research psychiatric practice can lag in some respects, and in other respects the psych researchers seem to not take practitioner observations too seriously these days.

<< The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable.

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 where people still believe they have free will, but are wildly effective at influencing others. That looks like advertising today, but worse.

I don't believe in free will. I haven't really for about 20 years or so. However, I act as if I do, as I've always done. It's a habit I choose not to break. Changing to act as I believe would be too much for me to handle. I would need to rethink pretty much everything I do. It's a completely different set of axioms in every domain of human knowledge, ethics, behaviour and interaction.

I don't think I'm raving mad, but perhaps because I don't act on my beliefs, I don't fit your conditions?

However, I do believe the justice system would be better run with this in mind.

Not that I agree with your premise, but why would you personally adopt a cognitive dissonance? A healthy mind is generally regarded as satisfied with itself as it is free of self-contradictions.

I think behaving as if there is no free will is such a change from how I was raised and how 99.99% of society believes and functions, would require some Buddha-level strength of will, which I don't possess.

It's so different than all the constructs we've created, you can kind of throw "generally regarded" out the window, frankly :) (don't mean that to sound harsh if it does). All of psychology would need to be rewritten. By me? I guess?

The 3rd option is to try and convince myself of what I regard as a lie (that we have free will), which is also difficult, but probably easier?

> I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad.

This presumes that humans are some kind of ultra-rational uber-mensch that is incapable of ignoring inconvenient facts.

Truth of the matter is that an illusion of free-will is just as good as the real thing from the perspective of an individual human's mind.

Also I think you're confusing free-will and predictability, everyone kind of seems to do this for whatever reason, but they aren't mutually exclusive at all.

All of your actions can be the result of quantum mechanical effects, eg. "true randomness", but still be completely unpredictable beyond a certain time/noise horizon even with a 'perfect' simulation. But unless you want to suggest that the free-will arises from the quantum-foam (which I mean, is as unfalsifiable a claim as any other religion, so go for it), you kinda run out of room to fit the free-will.

As for my experience of not believing in free-will? Its been pretty much fine.

I suspect that belief in something free-will-like is pretty evolutionary adaptive, so I think we'd expect it to arise in most simulated minds subject to similar evolutionary pressures.

The only thing I haven't really figured out is why we aren't just p-zombies, but what is life without some mysteries, right? (And given this, I wholeheartedly agree with u/mikeschurman about the need for a justice system that isn't unnecessarily cruel)

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?

Yeah I don't think we're getting there in our lifetimes, especially not with how neurobio/psych research has been progressing lately, but I agree it is theoretically possible. And along the way there are many imperfect models that could still be highly useful - I don't think replicable is a binary thing at this level of abstraction.

> girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less.

Not that it proves anything, but the converse argument, that depressed girls spend more time on social media or online in general, should also be examined. If the data could support this thesis to a similar degree, there is no conclusive statement about social media really inducing depression. It isn't just about effect size in my opinion but I don't see this problem answered.

That said, it doesn't need to be depression, there are other venues for negative influences. I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

Something has to be behind the seemingly coordinated rise in depression among children globally, that's the leading indicator he's using to assess the problem. His argument is that it can't be anything other than social media.

You're making the case in the micro scale: what is one person's relationship with depression and social media, and he's arguing in the macro scale. Something has caused depression to spike in children worldwide. What could it be?

The child mental health industrial complex which started in the 2000's and has boomed over the last decade as parents have been bombarded with the message that they need to rush their kids off to a therapist at the slightest sign of normal teenage angst or they are bad parents. Schools have bought into this and participate in the messaging. Once under "treatment" kids are repeatedly told they have anxiety and/or depression which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would have been normal teenage angst which in most cases resolves itself quickly now becomes a long-term issue of course requiring more therapy. This drives even more kids to think they have anxiety and/or depression because their friends have it.

Lately I have started to see push back among my teenage daughter's friends' parents as they have realized that their kids have actually gotten quite worse since starting therapy. Many have started pulling their kids from therapy and quickly seen their kids mental state improve.

I find it very hard to believe that an otherwise healthy person can spiral into depression simply by hearing about it a lot.

Formerly it was easy to find on Google, but I guess Corona "fortified" health information and the results are really bad right now because you cannot match the topic accurately.

I had no success, but suggestibility of illnesses and conditions is a huge topic in psychology. There were many induced cases of conditions that stopped when the "patients" stopped therapy.

There are many reasons why patients would accept such a false diagnosis. I don't believe this is the case here, though.

Therapists have a long history of creating entirely false memories in children, telling them that they were abused by satanists as a child! Teenagers often go through some depression-like episodes due to love interests or whatever, so telling them they're medically depressed is a much smaller leap than what came previously.

> The child mental health industrial complex

This seems like a rational, evidence-based position.

It's not a strong argument to say "what could it be other than X? therefore, X"

> What could it be?

Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever. It's an entire regime change, and we're still operating with our old instincts/hardware, which expects to be raised in a village by a largely familiar and empathetic community. The farther we get from that model, the more we'll be stressed out (until and unless we upgrade our hardware somehow, or, more likely, die trying).

Social media is small potatoes in comparison to the changes that have happened already, and especially to those that are coming.

> Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever.

Granting all of that to be true (though I think it could be argued otherwise), those things started happening long before the sharp rise in depression among teen girls.

And it’s all due to the very existence of progressing technology. Dr. Skrbina in the book Technological Slavery makes the case that humanity has no control over the impacts of technology on humanity, and that technology has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it.

https://ia600300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

> What could it be?

The state of the world? Better measurement and diagnosis of depression?

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If children/teens weren't exposed to so much online doom-mongering, they would be finding things to live for rather than fearing the future.

Even if the world is a bit shit, there's still plenty of opportunities for love, family, friendship, art, music, sport, and plenty more. Maybe even working towards solving one of the big problems we face, whether that's through science/tech or politics/economics?

Perhaps if they were narrowly focused on religion? It seems to work for the Amish and other intensely devout groups.

I've always been an atheist, but I'm starting to wonder whether the decline of religion has done more harm than good. We've certainly lost some of the basic human decency that was once passed on via religion. The concept of forgiveness seems to be one glaring example, and the rise of selfish consumerism and online narcissism.

Maybe we need something to replace religion, without the dogma, oppression, and conflict. Something other than the online tribalism and activism seems to be filling that void for many...

It's exactly this "we didn't start the fire" mentality that caused the situation we're in.

If you want the world to change, you need to do that. You can't just wait for it to happen.

The Internet, through social media and clickbait news, encourages people to get ever-angrier and ever-more-radical until they attempt to 'change things' by smashing and burning, or justifying violence against political 'enemies'.

I don't know what the answers to the world's big problems are, but I'm pretty sure that smashing, burning, and pushing for violent revolution, insurrection, or civil war is not the answer.

Most of the world's problems aren't solvable by everyday people. Better to focus one's attention on oneself, work, family and community, where a difference might be made.

(Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to charity or something of that nature. But obsessively following world events will make you miserable and solve nothing.)

Not disagreeing with your statements, but the key question in the research is why did depression spike in children worldwide _after 2012_.

At various points in my lifetime there have been reasons to be sad about the world - but what changed in 2012 that predominantly appears to affect teenage girls, and has been observed in several countries globally?

I'm saying that social media didn't cause the fears, but that social media ended the millenia of social pressure to just accept everything the way it is.

Cities once did the same, by increasing the population density you could hang out with people that had the same thoughts you did. But many countries successfully ended that through suburbanisation, isolating people once again.

Sounds like you could make an argument that cities make people depressed as well then.

I wonder if population density is a driving force for depression, both online and offline.

I'd buy that. I find cities miserable.

Maybe the Mayans were right all along?

In all serious, 2012-2013 coincides with 1/3 and 1/2 of the American population's owning a smartphone. Maybe that has something to do with it?

You are describing a commonly shared sentiment of today. This spike started nearly a decade ago, long before our current economic situation materialized.

To your point, who largely gets to decide which news stories get aggregated and which don't? Who has an outsized influence in shaping people's realities? By many metrics, times are tough, but by many other metrics, we are living in prosperous times as well.

> long before our current economic situation materialized

2008 was 15 years ago

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup on causation. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

If the converse were true it wouldn't explain the rise in depression.

But that’s not the basis of his argument. His argument is based on the timing of when social media usage started. I mint argue 3-4 hours or social media use alone didn’t cause depression, but had to be combined with a causal factor

The longitudinal factor is essential in this though. Teen mental health issues skyrocketed since 2012. That's really the whole point of his rebuttal of Proposition 1.

We are back to the rates of the 1980s. What caused mental issues to be so high back the ? In the long term it’s the 90s that seem like a strangely low level of issues.

> I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

Yell at the cloud? Nicely done.

No, I am just German and this is a language disability.

Well, in English it became a beautiful pun.

Or the two are linked via feedback such that social media makes depression worse and both are causally linked. It doesn’t have to be a one-way relationship.

I agree the research doesn't conclusively show direction, but in my experience so many psychiatry correlates are chicken/egg. Depressed people tend to get less physical activity because of their depression symptoms, but too little activity can be quite bad for one's mood. Lots of bad cycles with positive (in a dynamical systems sense) feedback connections.

The converse argument is far more plausible.

It's still just guessing. Can we please go from "plausible" to "we studied this"?

It's pretty hard to study beyond doubt though. You're not going to get much parental consent (or probably even institutional approval) to run a study where you require the experimental group of teenagers to spend 3+ hours a day on social media. And if the experimental group limits screentime, well I think parents of teens know how hard that can be to actually enforce across devices if the kid really wants to get on social media. You can't control what their peer groups are doing, and there are privacy limitations on what info you can even collect on specific phone activity from consenting adults, let alone teens.

In general, for studies of difficult long term behavior adjustments you basically need cooperative participants that will be honest when they slipped up. Teens are a tough population for this.

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup is below. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

> In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly...Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor.

This is the problem I have with studies of "social media". It's like saying "the internet" causes problem, or "computers". These are overly broad categories and I refuse to believe someone interacting with tight-knit hobby groups on Facebook for 4 hours per day is suffering the same consequences as someone doom-scrolling photos of models on Instagram for 4 hours per day.

This is a great point and it's where I struggle to moderate my own social media consumption.

Is aimlessly scrolling my twitter feed a net benefit to my overall mood and well being? I'm 95% sure it's not.

Is spending 20-30 minutes browsing hacker news every morning a net benefit to my overall mood and well being? I'm not sure.

Yeah it's hard to know precisely, it's probably not a big negative either though - focusing on cutting down the aimless scrolling is probably a better priority than figuring out the effects of 30 minutes of HN (easier said than done ofc).

When it comes to teens and their friend groups it's even more complicated than that. The same basic activity on the same platform could be worlds apart depending on the real world group dynamics.

Still, I think at a certain point (with 4 hours per day surpassing that point IMO) it's hard to argue the activity remains beneficial. I'm not sure how someone would have time to do an actual hobby and spend a literal 4 hours per day on hobby social media groups, unless they're so wealthy they don't need to work, or they're not taking care of their health e.g. sleeping too little.

So I don't think it would be a terrible public health thing to encourage people to set personal social media time limits (on average), even if it may be premature scientifically to say much specifically. Of course it's critical to not pretend that research is further along than it actually is in any sort of proactive public health PSA.

The author agrees, but says many of the studies his critics point to were combining all computer use into generic "screen time".

If true, the research hasn't even focused heavily enough on "social media" combined, much less drilled down into different sites/apps/usage patterns.

Starting to get to the age where my oldest daughter is demanding access to social media because all her friends are using it. Surprised more parents aren’t aware of the harms.

I'm just moving into this phase as well. The same parents that said it was ridiculous kids have phones, are now getting their kids phones. I've heard that not having a phone is essentially like knowing the whole school is invited to party, except you. I'm really not sure what to do.

It's definitely a coordination problem. While all the kids might be better off without access to social media, the one kid who doesn't when everybody else does gets a significant alienation downside, probably more than cancelling out the benefits.

That seems more like an upside if their 'peers' are indeed so easily addicted.

It seems preferable to be alienated from such a coordinated network of addicts.

It’s not a fault of their peers to be so easily addicted, rather the blame is on engineers working hard to make 2d images and text into dopamine drugs. Otherwise you’re right. People are so oversocialized that the very thought of alienation scares them. As if today’s society is the absolute pinnacle of goodness and everyone _must_ indulge in it as much as possible.

Humans are social creatures. Loneliness due to be alienated from your peers puts you at risk for mental health issues, potentially more so than the social media you alienated yourself from your peers to avoid. Hence the coordination problem.

Nearly half of all possible human actions puts one at risk for mental health issues, to varying degrees, so that doesn't seem like a sufficient justification for intentionally addicting oneself.

My little cousins first started with an LTE Apple Watch. This allowed them to use iMessage to call/text friends and family, but prevented the use of any web browsing/social media. The downside is Apple Watches only last a few hours on LTE.

They are now ~12 years old and just received their first iPhones. Parental controls/screen time is used to limit their access to social media.

I personally refuse to use TikTok. But I know that is the main App children use today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to handle that situation. A teenager without access to TikTok today is absolutely going to be mocked by others.

Maybe we give-in with clear boundaries and regular check-ins?

Give-in and Check-in support group :)

How old are kids these days requesting social media? I think at some point it's inevitable that they'll figure out a way on, so it's probably better to allow with boundaries and teach healthy habits early-ish. It can start getting socially detrimental to be completely off social media too, e.g. missing invites to larger gatherings.

But I have no idea how young we are actually talking here, my experience with this like a decade ago (so also not quite as harmful platforms) was handling the topic at around 13 yo.

At that time though completely restricting seemed a real gamble, some of the kids with no access snuck around and were the ones behind irresponsible shit that became school gossip. For example one kid without a Facebook made an account impersonating one of his teachers, used it to friend other teachers and see their private-ish info. Got easily caught because he also friended some of his real friends with the same account and even made some timeline posts back and forth, narrowed it down real quick.

Your kid will thank you, don’t give him/her. It’s sad to see any soul being oversocialized.

Let's assume that it's hurting girls.

Why would that be?

Because we raise children wrong.

Women often complain that when men post photos of themselves on dating sites, that they do so either with buddies, or holding some trophy of some sort.

But that's simply because men are taught from a young age that their value is measured in what they can provide or achieve. Girls, on the other hand, are taught that THEY are valuable. We can go back hundreds of years and find evidence for this, as arranged marriages were usually a transaction between the parents of the couple: usually livestock, goods, and land for the hand of the maiden. Nobody's paying for a new son. Likewise, there's no show called Groomzilla where bridegrooms lose their minds attempting to plan a wedding.

In 2012, the "thigh gap" started becoming a popular trend among girls and women in the US. For many women, attaining such a thing is a nigh-impossible feat. Their bodies simply aren't built that way. Very few of my male friends thought that thigh gaps were even attractive at all. But women don't dress and exercise and eat for men, they do it for women and womens' perceptions.

Compare that to today. Our popular media is dominated by a rainbow of ethnicities with bodies to match. The Kardashians are bobbling around with breast augmentation, butt lifts, botox, microblading, and lip filler to seem more "exotic" and women are following suit. Nowadays it's not such a bad thing to have a naturally big butt with thick thighs, and many more women are on the internet proclaiming their weight to the public to show people what XXX pounds looks like on a X'XX" frame.

It's been 9 years and the thigh gap girls would be out of place today. Many would consider it unattractive.

It's not social media.

It's that we teach girls that their physical appearance and their wardrobe is what gives their lives value. That's what you have to fix. Everything else is just vigorous hand waving in an attempt to sound intelligent.

Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s; extensive public awareness of climate change doesn’t imply a disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in the mid-late 2000s.

I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.

To borrow a quote from one of your other posts:

> climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable.

For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them.

So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

>I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions)

Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".

Although personally I am very concerned about AGW, I think the dismissals that talking about climate change is causing some "existential crisis" among young people are BS.

Whenever I hear that theory, it's always an armchair hypothesis. But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it. I think proponents of that theory, if they want to dismiss social media effects on personal self-esteem, should do exactly that - it's on them to prove that is the actual concern of girls committing suicide. I highly doubt they will find more significant evidence.

This is a personal anecdote: I have family members, mostly younger ones (and I’m in my mid-20s), who are extremely anxious about climate change. They’ve sought mental health services because of their worries. I don’t think that’s particularly unique.

I agree that it is absolutely not the only factor, which is the point I was attempting to make with a “weaker” version of Haidt’s argument.

I wonder if all the doom and gloom with everything is because people don't really understand statistics nor history. Sure, living through the climate catastrophe won't be comfortable, but given most of human history, living in that future is still a far better hand than all of your ancestors. Say you were born cesarean, are diabetic, broke your arm, had your wisdom teeth removed, got your colorectal cancer cleared up with the immune checkpoint inhibitor, got a covid vaccine then caught it and shrugged it off. Any other point of history you'd be dead 6x over at least with that medical history. That's something to celebrate.

Plus I think there is a bias over maintaining the status quo of the earth. Sure, pollution isn't great, but that's from a squandered opportunity of destroying natural resources before coming up with a sustainable way to use them indefinitely. Species go extinct, but for better or worse, that's how previously occupied niches are now exposed for rapid adaptive evolution of what is left over, and how we evolved to be who we are today. We are adding energy into the atmosphere, so if anything the life system will work even faster than before. Will we adjust? Who knows, but if you are on team planet earth it really doesn't matter. Life will find a way. Whether humans make it or not should be irrelevant, considering you have distant relatives who weren't human and only became human due to selective pressures from the environment at the time. We should expect to change when the environment does, dramatically even, as fighting that change amounts to fighting a march to a thermodynamic equilibrium. Consider we also have the head and shoulders advantage of any other species driving a climate change on earth previously (there were many, great oxygenation event, azolla event, and others), of actually being globally aware of climate change.

Isn't this a social media problem as well? Climate change is a hot topic on social media. When we are frequently exposed to doom-porn, we tend to develop a bleak outlook.

> But you could actually go and ask young girls what they are anxious about and how they deal with it

Many people have done that in actual studies. Here's one example: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5.... It's not just people projecting and thinking "I'm worried about climate change so the kids must be as well."

I have seen posters on this very website claim that they will not be having children as a direct result of the information they have received about climate change.

of course, it's difficult to determine how much of that is ex post facto reasoning as justification for a decision that was already made for completely different reasons…

Even in just the last few months there have been stories posted here about specific people who killed themselves stating it was because of worry about climate change.

AGW: Anthropogenic global warming?

It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their parents, etc. But in spite of those risks, which did impact adolescents, there was no massive uptick in mental illness.

I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world peace (given that it requires nations to compromise any individual interests or ambitions in favor of the global good). Most people don’t think world peace is achievable, so it’s understandable why that sentiment would carry forwards to global warming.

The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)

They aren't the same. Climate change activism states that you - yes you - are a bad person for not radically changing your lifestyle. Those changes may not even be achievable, but that doesn't change your moral culpability. Through your wanton lust for warm homes and nice red meat you destroy the world leaving nothing for the children. It's an incredibly moralized story.

The other examples you name are different. IRA terrorism? Not caused by you, not influenceable by you, nobody claims it is. MAD? Likewise, it's all decisions by politicians you never met who live far away.

Also, IRA terrorism probably wasn't going to affect you or your children and with MAD there was always a chance that it wouldn't happen. This was never in doubt.

The climate change narrative is uniquely calibrated to destroy people's mental health, and especially the mental health of over-socialized teenage girls, because it directly blames them for the worst possible things (literally the end of the world) and demands they change, whilst simultaneously telling them they actually can't change and the world is inevitably doomed no matter what. It also rather uniquely expects you to reject the evidence of your own eyes. The world is clearly not burning or on fire, the Pacific islands are clearly not sinking and politicians clearly do not believe there's any actual crisis, yet nobody is allowed to point those things out without social exile of the type that's especially dramatic for teenage girls.

Many religions make a far stronger moral argument about our failures as individuals, and yet arguably have far less influence over young minds than they have in the past. I can't say I've seen any evidence that teenagers (including my own) are especially burdened with any personal sense of guilt over their lifestyle and its contributions towards ecological damage. Whereas I'd certainly accept there is a sense of pessimism about the future health of our planet and what it might mean for what sort of existence they might have in 40 or 50 years time - and absolutely a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, given the fact very little positive change in behaviour has been seen by those in the best position to do so.

But you also had Samantha Fox singing "Touch me now!" while surrendering to the spirits of the night ;->

Yes, but The Sun was banned in my family, so we only "benefited" from her music.

The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.

> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state

I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.

I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.

>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.

This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.

The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.

Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.

I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.

I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.

We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.

Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.

> Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.

What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?

The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.

Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.

There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.

I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.

So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?

---

[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-pe...

> The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green stance? I can understand people being sick of the mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their money.

I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects.

They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired.

Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.

>The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore

This is because activism today has completely become synonymous with raising awareness. While raising awareness is important, it's also the easiest part of activism, since the rise of the internet, so it's what people gravitate towards the most. That's how we end up with so much doomposting and doomscrolling on social media.

Individual action served as the foundation of Civil Rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts. It may be difficult to reason why walking a hour to work every day in the hot, Alabama sun rather than taking this bus will expand their rights, but history taught us that it was important. Meanwhile, there isn't a similar coordinated effort to carpool and seek alternative means of commuting today. What was also important were donations that funded legal challenges to discriminating businesses and municipal governments. Again, you don't see grass-roots organization funding lawsuits against corporations that are illegally polluting. Most important of all is ironically lobbying. Without the lobbying efforts of the NAACP, the Civil Rights protection may not have made it through, and if they had, they would have been substantially weaker. Again, this isn't something that is ever suggested by climate activists, despite their awareness of its importance. As Haidt implies, unlike doomscrolling, these types of activism are actually empowering.

Climate change is now climate catastrophism. It's unfortunately many times more doomer today than ever. And while climate itself is not energizing, "doing something about it to save the world' is because it's simple even if it's in-effective.

A phenomena like Greta Thunberg wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for that.

And wind and solar and tesla and other avenue that doesn't really do anything other than let us waste a lot of money on ineffective things.

Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.

OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage.

There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.

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 solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues.

Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity.

The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.

Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.

If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.

Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.

agree, whats your point?

It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.

As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.

In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.

I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.

It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.

It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.

I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.

> I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness

> It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already starting to be visible.

> a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises.

That sentiment is only valid for a specific world demographic, I’d say Western people under 40 years of age (which also greatly matches this forum’s users, I would say). But as Eastern European guy in my early 40s I certainly do not match that “doom” feeling, and looking around at people my age and older (like my parents) I would say that lack of trust in the coming climate Apocalypse is shared.

Which matches the topic of the article, right?

I was contesting OP's point of view which was implying that everyone is on board with the climate doomerism, I hadn't read the article.

Your comment reminded me of the five general narratives we regularly tell ourselves about technology.

1) Technology is bad

2) Technology is good

3) Technology causes social change (tech determinism)

4) Social forces shape technology (social constructivism)

5) Technology is an accelerant

Essentially all stories of technology and society fall into one of these narratives. The most rare is #5, yet as you argue in this case, it is probably the most realistic. Haidt should be aware of these and I also don't understand why he is going with #3.

Yes, exactly. If I had to be florid, I’d say that Haidt is blaming the wind for the fire: he’s confusing the thing that accelerates underlying social ills and instabilities for things themselves. This resembles his own “map and territory” claims about those responding to him.

all of these could be true simultaneously.

What is special about the year 2012 in regard to these fears?

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?

This part seems deeply questionable to me:

> Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from the current 13 (which was set in 1998 before we knew what the internet would become) to 16, and enforce it by mandating that the platforms use age verification procedures, a variety of which already exist

Yes, age verification procedures exist, but I don't know of any that are actually effective without also being privacy/security nightmares. Haidt's analysis of "what damage is done" seems to assume an idealized implementation that never incorrectly flags an adult or causes a leak of personal information.

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 social media, without adverse impact.

These two groups seem to suggest that some kind of key missing life skill when combined with a need for social connection leaves people uniquely vulnerable to problems with social media.

My somewhat clueless guess about this is that people aren't situated to understand distance, authenticity, and relationships sufficiently. Maybe part of the problem is that many people are so socially starved of authentic and healthy loving relationships of all kinds in their lives, that many people can both know this but still be vulnerable. In some sense, maybe vulnerability rises because social media is a poor but just good enough placebo for loneliness?

I am also convinced that poor parenting compounds whatever is going on. Anyone who puts their 5th grader on Facebook or similar is a terrible parent IMO. Just the same as anyone who uses the iPad as a babysitter is a terrible parent IMO. But I suspect in many cases poor parenting is an artifact of parents who feel so trapped in unstable lives that hey can't feel stable or devote time comfortably to their kids. So maybe yet another factor.

    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."

Wow. I both respect this post, while being annoyed at its direction. It is very respectful in the intro, by explicitly not trying to be attacks against the critics. However, it then is entreating the readers to pick a side for most of the rest.

I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should look at how you can add to and learn from the data. Odds are high that both sides have some points that are worth picking up, such that picking a side is almost certainly shutting you out of some good ideas.

My personal push would be to say that claiming mental health became a problem in 2010s is absurd. It has long been a problem, as evidenced by such easy examples as Columbine. Before that, it was likely a largely local problem. In that you didn't hear about the kids that were having trouble, but they were there.

Does this contradict the assertions of the troubles of social media? I don't think so. Just don't think you have shielded your kids from all modern sources of mental ill by simply keeping them away from social media.

This is like thinking that drinking coffee or wine is de facto healthy for you. Likely, the health benefits are as much on what you were not drinking instead. Such that, keeping kids from social media by keeping them engaged with others around them is likely a net positive. By how much of that is keeping them engaged in a participatory way, versus keeping them apart? Such that, if you can get them engaging with things in a healthy way, you can make everyone in that area healthier. You can see this with online groups that are healthy. Yes, there will be some level of banning, as we all have capacities. But the healthy crowds engage. They don't just shout down. Even when they have to deal with people shouting, attempts are made to moderate.

But the author isn't arguing that mental health only became a problem in 2010, if I understand your post correctly. They're claiming it became more of a problem because of social media use, particularly among girls, no?

If by "Columbine" you're referring to the shooting, then that's only a US thing and doesn't apply to other countries.

Right, and in that I can mostly get behind. Again, I don't think the researcher is wrong. I think it is wrong to "pick a side" and only buy in to that.

You are right that I was referring to the shooting. But you will have to tell me why that isn't a mental health thing. Do I think it is also a gun control issue? Certainly, but even without the guns, those kids were still very mentally unstable. And growing up in that time, I knew many mentally unstable people. Luckily, they didn't have access to guns.

Similar statement could be about social media. Before 2010s, they didn't have access to social media. My assertion would be that they were likely still there.

Now, is mental illness contagious? I'd wager that is probable. But I don't know for sure. And I'm going to guess you need evidence and an open mind to both "sides" presented in this post to progress to an answer.

> I assert that you should not pick a side. Instead, you should look at how you can add to and learn from the data.

Haidt is sufficiently convinced by the existing data that he feels strongly that what is called for is action, not more data collection (or perhaps, action alongside more data collection).

You are apparently not as convinced as Haidt. That's OK, but you need to consider the perspective of someone who feels that we've already established what is happening with sufficient confidence that we need to move onto action.

And as Haidt says: what is the cost if the skeptics are wrong vs. if the alarm ringers are wrong?

Yeah, but I can say we should agree with his proposals without "picking his side." We probably should take a lot of the actions he is proposing. But we should not dismiss the "other side" while doing so.

Edit: I see I should not have said "the data" in what to learn from. Rather, I am arguing that we can and should learn from both sides here. For things that are more actionable, taking the actions will let us learn even more. But, and this is huge, it could be that taking these actions does nothing. The "do something" attitude that is prevalent in all society is often wrong. Particularly about what should be done.

It is truly remarkable to which great lengths people go to justify their unhealthy relationship with social media. It is nearly the same as telling an alcoholic they have an alcohol problem and then hearing excuse after excuse and re-framing and mental gymnastics to jump around the elephant in the room.

I'm glad write-ups like this one are a thing.

Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass.

> Maybe our parents were indeed right when they told us we are glued to our devices and should go touch grass.

And yet, their generation seems to be the most addicted these days, and the most unhinged when it comes to following conspiracy theories.

I suspect that those who grow up as social media “natives” will have some social norms that protect them somewhat, whereas many of those who came of age pre-social media will not have learned the social norms that can protect them.

We can see lots of useful examples of a protective social norms with alcohol. For example, it’s quite common for people to not drink any alcohol before a certain hour of the day. It’s not illegal to drink alcohol earlier, but it’s “just not done”. We can easily see the benefits of not drinking at the start of the workday.

I’m not going to guess what kind of social media norms people are developing in general. For me I only follow boring, topic-focused people on Twitter, and I only use the “Following” feed. Nobody is making me do this.

Likely because that generation was raised to believe everything they were told, starting from an early age with school, religion, then with television and newspapers, etc.

The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. and they learned to think more critically about what they are reading.

This is a good point.

I suspect that one reason is that "digital natives" have been raised with the tech, so have sort of a "natural resistance," yet the oldtimers were hooked almost immediately.

For myself, I have been using electronic communications, almost since they were invented (BBSes and UUNet, anyone?), so I have "more resistance" than most of my peers.

Yet, I still have to stay off of Facebook. This is pretty much my only social media venue. The main reason I stay, is because people play [relatively] nice, hereabouts.

Not according to this:

Social media, gen z wins: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314973/global-daily-tim...

Phones in general, millennials win: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/which-generation-....

Well of course they are, they poor dears grew up in a world without it and while there are exceptions, most of them lack any natural immunity. Just look at people over 50 (present company excepted, of course) trying to use the web without an ad blocker.

At least with alcohol it's more socially acceptable to say to friends "I've seen how much you've been drinking lately and I'm concerned about you" - you can't really say the same for tiktok or instagram use.

Sure you can. Well maybe you can't, but the kids these days even have a phrase for it - go touch grass.

this glued to devices meme is tired. look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones. note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine. i know it seems crazy, but humans reading information is a constant in public, and the only reason you didn't see more of it in the past is that you were part of the group consuming media, while also assigning intellectual value to the fact that a periodical is 'printed on paper' as if destroying a tree to make paper legitimizes the content in some way that a digital download of the same content can't.

get a better argument

Newspapers and magazines didn't microtarget their audience or have endless streams of content. This is like saying "look at all the people riding horses in old pictures, cars can't be that bad".

That's not even getting into the level of corporate surveillance social media and online advertising have brought us.

That's like saying there's nothing wrong with giving thalidomide to pregnant women, because pregnant women have always taken herbal supplements.

The obvious difference is that newspapers contain a relatively small amount of information packaged in a non-interactive, non-targeted, and less mind-absorbing format. People don't read newspapers for the dopamine hit, but for lack of something else to do.

Were you there? I was at the tail end of it - I used to take the train regularly in the mid 90s (to the present day). I remember some people with newspaper but it definitely wasn’t everyone.

And I just found about 15 pictures in a quick Google images search from the 70s and 80s that disprove your assertion.

I don't think the issue with phones is that people aren't engaging with each other in public spaces. I'll stipulate that it has never been the norm to engage with strangers on public transport. But I see a number of other differences between then and now.

For one, I don't think it was common for people to take a newspaper out of their pocket and look at it during social events with friends and family whenever conversation slowed down for a moment, or whenever it pinged with a notification. I observe my own wife spending far more time looking at her phone today than she ever spent reading a book before. Ten years ago, she might get lost in a book for a day or two, if it was a really good one. Now she walks around the house with her phone in-hand at all times. I had to pry myself back from that after starting to notice the same behavior in myself.

> note that _everyone_ is reading a newspaper or magazine

There is one popular picture where everyone is reading newspapers in a bus. And just like now it is not true that everyone is reading on phone on public transport. It was even less so before, because not everybody carried magazines with them all the time.

Narrative content is not the same as interactive content. The quality of the content is not the same. I'm not sure what compelled you to make your point in the presence of such obvious points.

This is quite a big pond, my friend. The "get a better argument" line might go over well in your social circle, but HN is a big place with many smart people. Have some humility.

> look at a picture of folks on public transport from before phones.

That's a strawman, the issue is kids spending their time on devices rather than outside doing real play with real people. That sort of thing.

One of cited objections is absurd:

> I don't trust any area of research where the odds ratios are below 3.

Then what’s the point of researching even slightly more subtle effects? This person might as well start smoking: they wouldn’t trust any amount of evidence that smoking causes cardiovascular disease — the odds ratio seems to be 2.

Haidt's quote leaves out the following explanation:

> That doesn't mean I only believe in 3–1 or greater effects. If you can show any 3–1 effect, then I'm prepared to consider lower odds ratios. If teenage girls with heavy social media use are three times as likely to be in the experimental group for depression 12 months later than otherwise similar teenage girls that don't use social media, then I'm prepared to look at evidence that light social media use has a 1.2 odds ratio, or that the odds ratio for suicide attempts is 1.4. But without a 3–1 odds ratio as a foundation, it's my experience that looking at any random data can produce plenty of lesser odds ratios, which seldom stand up.

I found this a little confusing, but I think what Brown is saying is that if all of the effects found in an area of research (not a single study) are small, it's probably not a real phenomenon.

Yeah, that seems completely absurd. If the experiments are rigorous enough, and the p value is low enough, you should be able to trust the results, no matter how small the effect is.

If, for example, research shows that social media use increases one's risk of depression by, say, between 32% and 34%, with p < 0.000001, they're going to discount a result that only has a 1-in-a-million chance of being a fluke simply because it can only show a 1/3 rise in risk, rather than a 3x rise?

That's not skepticism. That's dogma.

In fairness, the odds ratio for "smoking causes lung cancer" is about sixteen.

Kudos to Mr Haidt. I wouldn't have the patience to explain over and over again why being addicted to your phone and comparing your looks to global superstars makes girls lonely and depressed. People will argue over percentage points of an r-value instead of simply asking three girls whether using Instagram four hours a day makes them happy.

Okay but how are we supposed to get teen girls not to compare themselves to the looks of global stars?

This existed before social media. At best I can see it being a catalyst here and so sure limit or ban social media (at least for under 18s ~ 25s, whatever we agree on is a developed adult brain).

Lowering the percentage of teens with mental health issues is a good thing.

However that doesn't stop teens from comparing their looks to their peers, adults they know, and obviously global media (magazines, billboards, films, music, etc; what 'successful' women look like on cable news). How are the underlying cause for these negative feelings going to be addressed?

Girls have been comparing themselves to global superstars as long as there has been photography.

So I guess we should just ban graven images and get it over with. That'll clearly solve everything.

“But correlation isn’t causation!!””*

*causation is impossible to prove outside of STEM

It's quite hard for me to judge this topic because I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.

I think unfortunately it has become pervasive enough that you can't avoid experiencing it's toxic influence.

There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality.

Twitter show cases this best, it's prison politics in web form. Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you.

I think social media amplified trends that were there before. I remember when I came to the US in 2000 it was pretty fashionable to say “I am angry” all the time. And the hatred at politicians was pretty pronounced too. And the cable news was already spreading fear and anger. Personally I think modern media starting with cable TV allowed hatemongers to easily reach large groups. The internet just made it much worse.

I just wonder how we can get out of this. My main observations are only from the US but the thinking that there are “others” who can’t be understood or talked to but need to eliminated is quite deeply ingrained in a lot of people.

Oddly, I used to have the same view of sports. Growing up where I did, it was common for folks to be fanatical on their local college sports team. Such that they get mean to folks from their "rival" schools and are generally trash talking to everyone else. It was so bad, that I certainly thought that was how you were supposed to be. Pick a side and be aggressive to the opponents when watching the game. Goal was to make them do worse, so that your team would do better. It even makes sense in that regard.

However, that is ridiculously unhealthy. And it easily bleeds into other aspects of life. Heaven help you when you go watch some middle school team sometime, parents are being terrible to their kids. Worse to other's kids.

Does this mean sports are unhealthy, though? I'm convinced, right now, that that is definitely not the case. But I can also easily claim we tend to have unhealthy relationships with these topics.

Twitter really is the worst. At least the other platforms have some good mixed in with the bad. It is nice to stay vaguely connected to people in a sort-of holiday card way.

Twitter has nothing to redeem it. Even in communities where there’s attempts at substantive conversation the medium makes a horrible mess to follow.

> I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.

The social media business is definitely a toxic, failed replacement for social discourse.

Perhaps young citizens are driven to despair by this and their distress is an early indicator that we are failing as a society to provide adequate education and humanity.

As an adult citizen, I am almost driven to despair.

Consumer enclaves do not replace community.

How is twitter a prison. You can just not use it. I've never had an account there, and never used it other occcasionally reading a linked tweet in my web browser.

> Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you

Is this really a modern-tech thing? More like, it's easier and in the open now.

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground

There's no middle ground between wanting to kill someone and wanting to let them live in peace. If a person thinks someone is a born child molester (a "groomer" in the modern Newspeak) and that person thinks the punishment for child molestation is death (as is fashionable in Florida of late) there's no way they can meet that person in the middle.

And that, sadly, is not new, either, as Matthew Shepard demonstrated so memorably in my own lifetime, but things are rather coming to a head now that sexual and gender minorities are forcing their longstanding plight into the public eye. They don't die quite as quietly now, in other words, and the great mass of people is more sympathetic to them now than it ever has been in the past. This, naturally, makes their would-be killers feel a bit persecuted.

> and like the use of stocks in medieval times the concept of cancellation is much more power than any reality.

Here we go, right on cue. The notion of being run out of employment for holding the traditional bigotries is a bit new, isn't it?

> Everyone's in a gang and god help you if you aren't everyone will have a go at you.

Don't you have to be sufficiently active or prominent on the social media to be attacked?

(Yes, I remember the example of some hapless lady who tweeted "hope I won't get aids" before departing to Africa. I don't know how active she had been on twitter, or how typical the subsequent annihilation of her is.)

I also agree that this is probably true, but it doesn't mean that his arguments are good.

Yeah. Its not social media - its media in general

So if social media is toxic for mental health, why am I immune? What’s special about me?

> There has been a complete loss in any interest in meeting a middle ground

I disagree that this is a new phenomenon per se. There’s always been resistance to some aspects of a middle ground. Consider the case of Anita Bryant, who advocated that not being allowed to discriminate against homosexuals was a violation of her rights as a mother and as a “normal” American. She advocated for homosexuals to be ousted from schools and other environments because in her mind being gay was a corrupting force on children. This was well before the internet.

I also think the concept of cancellation is curious because it’s so fickle and stochastic. On one hand the lady who called the cops on a black man filming her choking her dog still doesn’t have a job 3 years later. On the other hand known sexual harasser comedians are selling out tickets like nothing happened. Hard to square that circle, and I wonder if there are more studies to quantify this phenomenon.

I just want to say this was one of the most enjoyable articles I have read in a long time. It's informative, respectful to critics, and exudes a "confident but restrained" tone that is so rare in public discourse these days.

We must have read different articles. What I read amount to special pleading where the author confuses scientific and judicial epistemology, doesn't do a literature review, and comes cross as hopelessly naive.

>So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter. The question for readers — and particularly parents, school administrators, and legislators — is which side you should listen to as you think about what policies to adopt or change.

I've been reading all the essays, and the meta-commentary is that the reason the debate reads the way it does is that it's ... not on social media.

His books The Righteous Mind, and Happiness Hypothesis are similarly well written. He narrates the former himself in the Audible version.

I wonder how much of the negative aspects of social media are due to the gamification of it as well as the algorithms that boost certain types of content.

For example, if Twitter had no algorithm, didn't show you the number of views on your post, didn't show you the number of likes on your posts or retweets, and you just used it to post funny memes, interesting articles, and life updates to your followers if it would still have the same negative impacts that it does today.

I also wonder what a social media site would look like if the only way to follow someone, was if they gave you a QR code that was generated on their phone. That way most of the people that followed you would only be people you've met in real life. The QR code could expire in like 5 minutes to prevent people from just posting it somewhere to get follows. It would be much more private, and much slower paced, and people couldn't see any of your posts without following you.

>QR code that was generated on their phone

this gets brought up a lot, often paired with GPS/other sensor matching and with a flavor of PGP-first thinking, web of trust, etc.

The protocol only allows interaction with other people that have swapped keys or been "vouched", depending on the multi-sig requirements baked into the protocol.

With the correct marketing scheme, this could take off, ironically being fueled by FOMO/exclusionary social pressure and meme pressure.

what made the original facebook so great is that it was

1) semi-exclusive (ei. your parents weren't on it)

2) The content you saw on your feed was 100% things that your direct friends manually typed or shared with you. No recommended posts from strangers, no corporate pages, no ads, no games, no articles from groups that you follow to keep up with the local news (eg. HOAs, local politicians, news station), no posts from extended family members that you accepted as friends out of peer pressure, etc.

Trying to grow and become that one-stop-shop for everything the internet has to offer is what ruined it. Having your mom, your 7 yr old cousin and the local shops on the same platform as young adults is more profitable for facebook, but it doesn't make it better for the users.

The only platforms that have kept their reputations over the years are those with leaders that knew how to say no to ideas that compromises the great/unique aspects of the platform in exchange for a larger quarterly profit.

An IRL-only social media site could actually make the problem worse, especially for teen girls.

One common hypothesis for why social media are bad for mental health of teens is that there is no escape. All the terrible things kids do at school (like bullying) now happen 24/7, with little oversight. Forcing people to meet in real life to engage with each other can actually make the problem worse by making it harder for outcasts to find a more supporting network.

I think there is some good stuff that could be described as "Social media", and lots of bad. For example I think all the "influencer" stuff is likely to be problematic, where people show how great their lives are (and by implication how bad yours is).

I think social media like following just your real life actual friends on Twitter / Facebook / having a WhatsApp group is a very different thing.

I think that many videos on YouTube are no different or better than normal TV. Things like creators teaching their skills, or Numberphile.

I'm worried that by saying "Social media is bad" we will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What about monitoring variable levels of social media consumption with the individual levels of depression / anxiety.

I have periods of higher and lower social media usage. And I have noticed that there is a strong inverse correlation with my mental health.

My personal experience is just anecdotal evidence but a study with time variation may eliminate a lot of individual factors ( e.g people with depressing nature using more social media) but leave open the question if depression causes the increase of social media or is there other way around. ( I think thant both)

Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell".

Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?

“Anti” coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning.

Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you.

Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back.

Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.

Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point.

It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.

Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.

This is an excellent point; it’s hard to square Haidt’s precious claims with coddling unless we’re to accept some kind of convoluted “whiplash” argument: children who are first coddled are then “shocked” with social media. But this requires a generational or chronological explanation that isn’t evidenced: we’d expect to see suicide rates level off with more recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who’ve been on the Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by Haidt doesn’t show this.

The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.

As others have explained, there is a middle ground. You won't make people tougher by throwing them to lions, but by creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation.

It's not inconsistent. Social media feeds distortion, and has no conquerable obstacle. "Toughening up" means facing reasonable challenges - they are not equipped yet to habdle algorithmically designed cocaine.

Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?

Being exposed to adversity at 1 PM in the classroom is fundamentally different from being exposed to adversity at 11:30 PM laying in bed. One of those is much closer to the ancestral environment the human mind is naturally equipped to deal with.

What's funny is that it's the baby boomer generation that created the concept of giving out participation awards to their kids and overly helicopter parenting them, and then 25, 30 years later complains "all these young people are so coddled and soft and wants recognition for the smallest thing!"

Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either.

Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation.

In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.

You make no sense.

"Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences which form and harden their characters.

You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking about.

I really wish there were more essays about controversial subjects that would take on the tone and presentation of information in the manner that Jonathan Haidt does it.

He really is an exceptional communicator and (to me at least) appears to be more interested in "the truth" than he is in "being right."

> Similarly, when the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski said “The map is not the territory,” he was reminding us that in science, we make simple abstract models to help us understand complex things, but then we sometimes forget we’ve done the simplification, and we treat the model as if it was reality.

I think this is a very useful criticism for the subject as a whole.

The very term, "social media" is incredibly broad. That doesn't mean it's useless: but we should recognize that it contains a lot of diverse context. If there is a cause of mental illness, what would that look like contextually?

The introduction of smart phones and social media can provide a long list of answers to that question. Which of those answers is more or less significant?

None of this is to say we shouldn't be concerned about the effect that social media and smart phones have on mental health. What's important here is what we choose to do about it.

Do we promote a different type of social platform? Current social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are infamous for promoting unhealthy behavior. What kinds of alternative behavior would be healthy?

Do we encourage parents to limit their childrens' social media time or invade their childrens' privacy? The internet is a significant attack surface for bullying and assault, but is it wise for parents to simply take its place?

Do we encourage parents to take away mobile devices, and reinforce traditional face-to-face social activity? Social with who, and where?

It's abundantly clear that social media and smart phones have caused a significant change in our society. We can do better than blindly react to that change.

I would argue that the most powerful tool of the human mind is objectivity. The more we learn about how social media and smart phones change our society, the better equipped we will be to direct that change to our benefit.

If I just walk around the neighborhood, nearly half the pedestrians are staring at the phone, oblivious to where they're going. Sometimes I have to shout "Hello!" to get them to not run into me. And these are (mostly) adults.

One guess what class of app they're all staring at.

I quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Never got in tiktok or any other social media. Our brains aren't mean to handle so much information at once. We can't parse it. We can't distinguish reality from fiction when we're constantly being told several things at once or youre being told a lie several times a day. I also can't stand that we can't just live our lives without having a company collect data to try and manipulate and / or sell me something. I understand that some people need social media but, if you can do without it...do it.

What about the increase in mental health awareness (including: better education and reducing the stigma) - is being able to detect more cases contributing in a meaningful way to the overall increase?

I'm not sure this would account for the increased number of girls allegedly cutting/poisoning themselves. According to the graph on an older article on his substack, the number of girls admitted to hospital from self-harm has gone up by 48% since 2010. Perhaps some of these cases would have been categorised as accidental in the past (or not even taken to hospital maybe) but all of them?

I see such links in HN to be a very good example of mental illness, if you need research to know social media causes mental illness, then you’re mentally ill (or never used social media). It should be obvious to anyone who used social media for any significant amount of time. Yet social media usage is so normalized, especially in places like HN where people are chronically online, that people just self-rationalize.

I don’t think you should listen to what psychologists say; even with their own studies at least 2 out of 3 times it cannot even be reproduced. Let alone something they didnt design a study for..

As far a common sense goes; social comparison and depression have already very well known links, and social media is purely social comparisons, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think social media might have an effect on depression incidence or severity.

Is Hacker News "Social Media"? I think it probably is. Do we apply the same critique of Social Media to our own relationship with Hacker News?

I thought this statement in the article was particularly worth celebrating:

> So this is a good academic debate between well-intentioned participants. It is being carried out in a cordial way, in public, in long-form essays rather than on Twitter.

I wish there were more examples of this kind of discourse for other hot-button issues of the day.

Furthermore, when you zoom in on girls, the relationships are not small: girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less. The common refrain “correlation does not prove causation” is certainly relevant here, but I showed that when you bring in the three other kinds of studies, the case for causation gets quite strong.

I know from long experience that saying "I got this far in the article and I can't be bothered to read the rest" is a good way to get hated on, but give me a freaking break. You have to first ask why those girls are spending more than four hours a day on social media.

The obvious inference is that the girls who spend less than an hour a day on social media have full lives and the ones spending so much time there it's like an unpaid part-time job have vacuous lives and they are trying to fill the void with something that can't do it.

Social media no doubt exacerbates their issues but, no, it doesn't cause them. Their lives are screwed up and excessive use of social media is more like a symptom.

You really should have gotten through the rest of the article, it addresses everything you bring up and more.

Not everyone who smokes cigarettes gets cancer.

If you take young minds which are stressed and unfulfilled, and give them a device which provides short dopamine bursts at the expense of finding actual fulfillment, you get depression.

If Pascal's wager teaches us anything, it's that we want to start from a maximum-entropy prior and model the process generating the two hypotheses.

If a guy ends up living in a gold palace with Michelangelos on the ceiling if those are the only two hypotheses to consider, that might skew his analysis just a bit.

Hmm, he seems to think that the criminal standard of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt) is equivalent to p<0.05 in the sciences. That is highly dubious. I'm surprised he doesn't know the by-now standard belief that p<0.05 is, itself, a criminal standard of proof (lol).

I've been noticing that I'm much more likely to argue/fight with friends by text rather than in person. Not talking about social media, just plain old chat. Maybe because we miss real-life signals that help us adjusting the conversation.

We need to improve our emotional intelligence by talking about emotions and feelings to become more resilient. We as a society are emotionally immature and let others manipulate us and cede power to them because we are scared of our true selves.

When I see someone taking a selfie at a pool who appears to have had cosmetic surgery, I simultaneously feel pity for and disinterested in knowing them for being slaves to and simulacra for the opinions of others.

I think that blaming 'social media' is kind of misguided. That is mostly passive thing. The real issue is more likely toxic social relations and communication with peers, which is just provided by social media.

the whole insistence on going with what they believe in, 'social apps bad' (and kinda just that, not really going deeper into 'what are the interactions', etc.), just makes this seem kinda off (and gives a 'collaborative confirmation bias' vibe). sure, apps exist, but is it 'apps' or 'people being social'. and they kinda touch on that, but still fall back to 'social media bad' as a clickbait headline. 'it's kinda not about that, but let me engage in clickbait anyway'.

'being on a social app' is a high level / ambiguous enough of a thing, that trying to tie a rise in 'communication availability' and 'people being online' to rises in other things, kinda doesn't connect. (well, not as directly of a 'cause-effect', muddled with all the various ways that 'use'/'online' can be.) sure, it may be 'screen time', 'time spent online', but then just say that, not like it's 'social media being there, at all'

if they want to continue milking that headline, great. i just no longer see 'pointing at social apps and saying social app bad' as interesting, insightful, or valuable, at all. it's saying nothing.

How many of Haidt’s critics have large enough followings on social media that they are familiar with the sweet taste of upvotes?

The map is indeed not the territory. There is an insane amount of people who live in a fantasy world, where they believe that theory equals practise, which is absolute and utter nonsense. They do not understand the value of experience, most likely because they don't actually have any.

1. One can always derive theory from practise, but never the other way around.

2. You might have read every single book about boxing, but that still doesn't make you a boxer.

Couldn’t it be that people become more aware of mental health problems because of social media?

Stop calling it social media, it's anything but social. It's Anti-Social Media, and it is destroying civilization.

Why do people still take this guy seriously

Mental health is an incredibly tricky thing to study. Since all observations are of a person says they feel and what observations can be made of the person and what they may say various semi standard questionnaires.

The first problem is defining what depression is. This is actually hard.

The present official definition can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176119/

A great lecture on it by Professor Robert Sapolsky can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc He does this far far better than I ever can. I include a tiny transcript below.

Even within the medical field the term is used in ways that complicate matters.

We find "Depression, otherwise known as major depressive disorder or clinical depression"

This is incorrect.

In everyday use the term depression is not equal to "clinical depression", or "major depressive disorder"

In regular conversation depression is often used instead of "sad". or "bummed".

If relying on a self-report survey that asks in part if you feel or have felt depression over XXXX timeline a lot of people will say "yes". Yet most will probably not meet the definition of major depressive disorder or clinical depression.

If in everyday speech care was taken to only use depression for sad, and clinical depression was used for the metal disorder then things would be easier but as I showed above even medical professionals tend to use the term "depression".

I think using the term "depression" has become a lot more popular than it was.

50 years ago, using it in common language was so common.

This gets better in the studies when (some) people attend college where (some) people are seen by mental health professionals. However, in my personal knowledge hte above is also primarily self-reported, and not based on the treatment and therapy of the majority of the people in question.

Yet we have a non-representative sample. Only people with privilege to attend high university and of them the people who have sought out help.

So that is the problem of semantics.

A second problem is why If a girl who spends only 1h a day on social media is less prone to "depression" than a girl who spends 8h a day on social media does that mean social media is the big factor.

I find it likely that it wold often be the case that a person with a healthy social life, a good family, good activities, that takes up a lot of time.

While someone who spends 8h on social media per day perhaps needs more positive activities. Which can be incredibly difficult to achieve.

The argument has been made in different forms for a long time. Too much TV, too much rock music, too much video games, too much black metal.

Yet I do think that social media is far too often a destructive component in someone's life. With severity than listening to a vinyl recording all day or playing Quake. I would be quite happy if it all died. It dont see that happening.

Partial transcript of a lecture by Professor Robert Sapolsky "" So starting off, first giving a sense of symptoms. And right off the bat, we’ve got a sematic problem, which is we all use the word depression in an everyday sense. You get some bad news about something. You now have to replace the transmission in your car. Somebody disappoints you enormously. And you feel bummed. You feel depressed. You are down for a few days. That’s not the version of depression I’ll be talking about.

Next version, you do have some sort of large, legitimate loss, setback, whatever, losing a job, unemployment, death of a loved one. And you are extremely impaired by a sense of malaise for weeks afterward. And then you come out the other end. That’s sort of what I’ll be talking about.

But even more so what I’ll focus on is the subset of individuals who, when something like that occurs, falls into this depressive state. And weeks and months later, they still have not come out the other end.

Terminology. The everyday depression that we all have now and then, that sort of version. The second one, the something awful happens and you feel terrible for a while, and then come out the other end, a reactive depression. The third version, where you are flattened by it for long periods afterward, a major depression. And what you also see with people with major depression after a while is it doesn’t take something awful externally to trigger one of those again.

People always say correlation does not equal causation but they never mention how does one determine causation definitively?

Unlike typical observational science, causation must be established by having the experimenter intervene with the experiment himself. The experimenter must introduce or remove smart phones to the population being experimented on and record any changes to the data.

So it's actually very possible for the author to prove his own theory beyond reasonable doubt.

These are the 2 options I can think of that can be done individually or together:

   1. Remove smart phones away from people who are depressed. Measure depression levels over time.

   2. Pick a set of humans that don't use smart phones and choose who will have access to smart phones and who never will over a period of 5 or 10 years. Measure depression levels over time.

We have procedures in place to prove things like this with medicine. I think it's very possible to conduct experiments like this with the rigor of clinical trials given that you can literally remove or introduce the predicted causative agent from any human: smart phones.

It's worth it to mention here that not all things are amenable to causative experiments. I believe in climate change but it is not possible to run a causative experiment where you remove or introduce the causative agent: greenhouse gases. It is unfortunate that climate change cannot be established as true beyond reasonable doubt simply because all current evidence is correlative.

But for smart phones it is very very possible for the author to go far beyond a retort and actually prove his claims correct.

Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?

Which period are you referring to? According to https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-... this is not the case.

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