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Comment by knallfrosch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

You're never going to get people to not compare themselves with their peers. Comparing yourself through media like magazines etc has been the case for at least 50 years. The teen mental health epidemic has really started in 2012 is what Haidt is talking about.

This. Exposure matters.

Before social media and smartphones came together exposure was infrequent. Now it's nearly constant. It's like the difference between going to a restaurant where smoking is allowed and living with a chain-smoker.

More like 100: my grandmother had skimpy eyebrows that she penciled in her whole adult life because she overplucked them as a teen, trying to look like the movie stars she saw in the rare magazine she could buy in the Dust Bowl-era Texas Panhandle.

Well for one, it would require interest in teen girls that goes beyond "I need a talking point for culture war that I am currently waging".

What culture war specifically?

No one really talks about it but I think it is a symptom of bad parenting. How many times have people sat their kid down and explained these Hollywood types are not the average looking person?

Today, you also have to explain that even the pictures of your friends are not "the average looking person" because almost everything online gets fed through various filters.

When you're exposed to something over and over, you internalize it. Explaining helps with this I'm sure but only slightly.

I'm pretty sure the people suffering are well aware of that. This sort of mental illness isn't the kind of thing thats rooted in logic-brain, and simply "explaining" it doesn't make it go away, else society wouldn't have as much of a problem.

Do you have children? How old are they? Do you actually believe that "sitting your kid down and explaining XXX" to them is likely to cause substantive changes in what are fundamentally deeply non-cognitive takes on the world?

This article is about making people even acknowledge that social media is a or the problem. Acknowledging that one has a problem is the first step. Unfortunately, I don't have a societal solution ready.

> 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?

Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their peers?

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

So if your peers have a nice fat ass that the boys all like to oggle at while walking between classes and you're stuck with a skinny thigh gapping flapjack white girl tush you bet your ass you're gonna start eating some cheese berders.

The feeling of wanting to fit in is constant for teens. What 'fitting in' looks like changes over time.

What's desired has changed over time in my life alone. Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white women in media shaming themselves and asking if their dress made their ass look fat while also trying to get boob implants.

Nowadays booty is WAAAAY more prominent and desired and those old tired jokes about their ass looking fat a hell of a lot less common.

From the show Brockmire:

https://youtu.be/lOBjS2kzL3w

> What's desired has changed over time in my life alone. Booty is a great example. I grew up with mostly white women in media shaming themselves and asking if their dress made their ass look fat while also trying to get boob implants.

The "ideal body" is actually healthier now than it was 20 years ago.

But I'm not talking about skinny vs a few curves. I'm talking obese. Clinically obese. As in BMI over 30.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/basics/adult-defining.html

> The "ideal body" is actually healthier now than it was 20 years ago.

So you agree that the 'ideal body' does not necessarily mean it's 'heathier' and because the 'ideal' changes through time.

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

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