What Happened in 2007?
whathappenedin2007.com
whathappenedin2007.com
If you take a data set and point out (while squinting) that it appears maybe to be turning down in the last two data points, any reasonable analyst should point out that those look like routine outliers and that if you want to project a trend you need more data.
Instead, you'd taking a very large (and well understood) signal in the next 5-ish data points and saying that it's proof of the trend. Which is silly.
No, that chart shows covid, period. If someone wants to show an uncorrelated effect across a signal that big, they need to come to the table with a lot more sophistication than a "WTF Happened?" blog post.
You can't do this like this. I mean, you sort of can if the effect is big enough (c.f. the 1971 site which inspired this one, and which makes a much better case). But if you can't eyeball a very clear angle in the chart without argument, you need to come to the table with some kind of fitted curve and real research.
I am convinced about the premise but for the love of god zoom out those charts.
The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such are extremely US centric.
Smartphones were a positive revolution for so much of the world. Consider the hundreds of millions of children (more than the entire US population exclusively used in this argument) growing up in rural poor households surrounded by illiteracy. They suddenly had access to the wider world. They had the opportunity to take initiative in ways they didn't have before. They had access to limitless education, and an easy way to pick up a global language. When kids left the village for a city they could video chat with family instead of going months of no contact.
To some extent, I'm talking about the final leg of the internet revolution, not phones specifically, but in many areas of the world where electricity is intermittent, it was phones that finally drove wider internet penetration.
Are there downsides? Certainly. is smartphone addiction and social media a problem? Research says that it probably is, but for a long time I've felt that the positive impacts on a global scale are being downplayed, especially in the US. Not everyone who gained cell phone connectivity had a PC at home with a steady power supply as a baseline, and schools stocked with computers. We have a huge wave of new people growing up who had access to far more information than the previous generation. If I'm going to make a casual, broad-sweeping generalization of impact, I'll hazard to guess that the positive impact is being greatly underappreciated globally.
That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before.
Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify.
For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide).
Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago).
Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc.
The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift.
If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)
I'd rather see a One Book Per Child global initiative. (Maybe Dolly Parton is on to something—Nicholas Negroponte should take note.)
An adjacent phenomenon that needs investigation is "Adult ADD". Extending the theory of adolescent ADD to adults doesn't add up. It's surprising that these are considered by default to be the same condition, especially in people who didn't have issues during adolescence. The increase in prevalence demands a non-genetic explanation. Better explanatory theories are: 1. We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults. 2. It's a fad (when will prevalence decrease?), and 3. It's the smartphones/apps.
Personally, I think it's mostly 3, with the infinite scrolling apps having a huge effect on attention and executive function, but also some of 1 given the information economy.
This should go without saying: if an intervention is working for you, or a disease theory has given you explanatory power, you should stick with both.
Neoliberal capitalism is not equipped to either identify or solve these problems. Some attempts are being made ("Calm" apps, self help books, etc) but these are sand castles trying to stem the tide. Society as a whole must recognize that screens exist in a superposition of "encyclopedia", "cigarette", "panopticon", and take steps to regulate their use. A bummer for libertarians, but life-saving for society.
Your next sentence seems to suggest you think ADHD only affects children?
What doesn't add up is people with new problems with executive function that start as adults, and suspiciously as they have more control over their screen time, and more money to spend on technology and apps. They get an amphetamine prescription, which definitely helps, but they also get a bad explanation. Something like: genetics, or a story about how their brain was better in the ancestral environment or whatever. Doesn't explain the onset of the condition, doesn't explain why it became a problem completely after development.
This kind of dismissive rhetoric increases the stigma around seeking a diagnosis as an adult, which is already hard enough because an entire system of caregivers, teachers, and institutions already failed the undiagnosed person throughout their life and navigating the health care system, especially for mental health, is extremely frustrating - and challenging from an executive function perspective.
Damn, now I want this as a spoken word sample on a house music track
And then COVID appears to have had a massive impact.
On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old, was a key date IMO.
Facebook was also quite different back then and it was still something that people mainly used to find people who were in their classes
If it was smartphones plus modern social media I would expect the trend to start at least 5 years later
On the other hand teens already had dumbphones for texting and Myspace before that
That opened a Pandora's box of what can be described as ideological harassment online. Again, we live in a world now in which everyone does it. It is now so pervasive, that the current generation cannot understand what it was before, and therefore cannot perceive what changed (not being nostalgic, lots of things were bad back then).
In my opinion, that explains a lot of related trends related to mental health, perceived internet addiction, even device type market share.
Those also hit around the same time. People doom scroll on desktops and laptops too.
Honestly just infinite scroll alone is shockingly addictive. Pair it with algorithms that sort content by measured engagement and your brain stem doesn’t stand a chance.
Social media algorithms also prioritize trash content because that’s what maximizes engagement. Think of it this way. One person walks by on the street and says “hi.” Another walks up and strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which one of these maximizes engagement? Which will the algorithm perpetuate? This, IMO, explains the evolution of political discourse over the past 15 years and is why a troll is now President.
Smart phones are just a particularly good platform for these systems, but it’s the systems themselves that are toxic. They work on a desktop screen too. It’s just that laptops and desktops aren’t as portable and are not always with us in the same way, which limits the damage.
Modern social media provides effectively limitless opportunity for consumption, but smartphones unlock the ability to actually drink from that firehose regardless of time or place.
Rest is critical for recovery from any sort of stress, but for many people today there is zero rest from this stuff, it’s first thing in the morning through last thing at night, it’s in the car while driving, it’s during the thirty seconds between customers at work, it’s on the beach, in the pool, waiting in line at the post office, at the dinner table, during a movie at the theater, on the toilet, on an airplane, and a million other times and places that would otherwise provide “rest” if it weren’t for smartphones.
But still, not liking something doesn't mean it needs to be the cause of all social ills. These graphs don't seem to show anything. You've got trends starting in 2018, 2012, 2022, and some seeming to start before your data even begins, which was 2006, not 2007. Clearly, the only reason you picked 2007 at all is the iPhone debuted that year. The data didn't lead you to that year. These data don't seem to lead to anything. With respect to college admissions tests, the most obvious reason they'd be declining seems to also be the most mundane. With college all but mandatory and skilled trades collapsing, more people than ever are taking these tests, including people who won't do well and wouldn't have bothered in the past.
I'm not generally against the idea that smart phones and social media do real harm. The rise of at least visible and outright hostile political polarization seems related and Jonathan Haidt's arguments about mental health effects are at least reasonably provocative if not conclusive. But there is very little there there with these particular arguments. You may not necessarily be wrong, but I'd caution against starting with a conclusion and working backwards to try and find data that supports what you already believes, bending it if you can't actually find any. That isn't intellectually honest inquiry.
The productivity figures show decline from trend in 2007 with no recovery since. Presumably 2007 was chosen for that reason. This is also the time in popular culture when things were thought to have started to go all wrong.
Whereas the iPhone wasn't widely available until 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. The original iPhone was only available to a small beta testing group (~1 million people) in the USA. While it is technically true that some people had iPhones in their hand in 2007, it is highly unlikely that tiny number of people "destroyed the world" by it. Clearly something happened before the iPhone.
Making a plot of the trajectory of this scam is nice, but it should at least be labeled properly. Talk about a thing does not a thing make.
I added a little 16px margin now - hopefully that is better. Thanks for checking it out!
After that, the soil was fertile for the rise of populism. Bungled post-GFC recovery, algorithmic manipulations from social media, unmitigated immigration, COVID and its aftermath just fueled the fire further.
I would love for a proper study of this hypothesis to be done.
But we no longer have any way to prove it, because the malign, anxiety-and-loneliness influence of social media cannot be avoided even if you are not on social media.
1) if you are not on social media, you will be more lonely, because nobody invites anyone to anything anymore except via social media (trust me on this) and people simply assume you've seen the news of their event and judge you if you don't turn up
2) if you are not on social media, you will find yourself excluded from friendship discussions that started on social media, you will find yourself negotiating family arguments wrongly etc.
3) not being on social media doesn't stop you being stuck with leaders who were elected off the back of a storm of social media **wit FUD posting; life's anxieties are real and in many ways worsening fast, and they are social-media-fuelled whether you are on Facebook or not.
4) You cannot properly advertise your product, find all your possible clients or respond to client feedback without engaging with social media; only a handful of tradespeople can really pull off just not being there at all.
There is no control group.
Why assume that the OECD is measuring something well? What do you know about them and the PISA test?
RFKJR, an idiot, has charts from the CDC, a reliable source, that show autism prevalence is going up and to the right.
There are two explanations for the chart: one is toxic environment increases and causes autism (RFKJR), and one is more screenings, broader criteria and diagnostic substitution (CDC). Who do you think is right? What do we call CDC's explanation?
Does the chart have "complexity" (you criticize this elsewhere)? Can a chart be both "real" (as in not "fake") but also flawed? Do we pick and choose which charts we use which words for, depending on our politics? (Yes).
Why do you think politically-influenced thinking doesn't apply to you? Do you think "blaming smartphones" is apolitical?
How does your analysis about smartphones differ structurally from an RFKJR presentation? Remember, he's an idiot. You bring out some charts, there's a lot of coincidence time series, and the sources on the face of it are reliable. Does that make "it" true?
RFKJR (an idiot) also talks about "rigor," like you do. He goes and mooks his theories on Fox News instead of Hacker News. Okay, does he ever take down the stuff he was wrong about? (No). Do you see? So even if you are "wrong", you go and talk about rigor, are you going to take down your website? Or bring it down until you fix its flaws? (No.)
Finally. We only talk about charts and benchmarks that align with vibes. Apolitical example: all the AI benchmarks show Anthropic, Google and OpenAI as the "top 3", because if you made a benchmark, as rigorous as it is, that showed something else, people would not believe it. It doesn't matter if what it measures is real. For something political, this problem is acute.
Does this vibes phenomenon exist for "charts" about "crime"? (Yes). Does this phenomenon describe test scores?
And this would creep up on us very slowly. Not only would we not notice, but we’d lose our ability to notice. It’d be like the whole species slowly descending into dementia.
Most of what I’ve seen suggest that the effect starts really kicking in around 1000ppm. But as outdoor levels rise, indoor levels, which are usually higher, rise too. They can already hit those levels.
If we keep burning more and more carbon outdoor levels could hit that by the 22nd century.
If we start getting here we need to put away the green moralistic finger wagging and start looking at ways to suck CO2 out of the air like it’s an emergency. Things like ocean seeding or huge scale industrial scrubbers powered by solar or nuclear power, or all of the above.
This is a far scarier possibility than just climate change. The only thing scarier than this is the clathrate gun, which luckily seems to be considered unlikely by most climate scientists (at least unless we get to really insane CO2 levels like thousands of ppm).
Good news on that front. Because you constantly produce waste CO₂, you have detection mechanisms letting you know when the amount in your lungs is excessive.
You picked the only gas where accidental suffocation isn't a possibility as the one you wanted to worry about.
CO2 outdoors has gone from about 280ppm to 420ppm in the last hundred years. If we kept going for another century it could approach 1000ppm, which is where you start seeing these effects.
The scary question is whether there is any effect at 420ppm. We don't think so, but very marginal effects are hard to detect. Yet a global loss of an average of 5 IQ points would have significant large scale effects on society. It's also possible that it doesn't affect all people equally, since most things don't.
There have been times in Earth's history where CO2 concentrations were in the thousands of ppm, but there were no humans then.
A real name when challenging the status quo unfortunately attaches the risk of retaliation from either the intended organisation or person, or their fanboys, via direct or creative sets of problems designed to waste time and / or money. Sadly the internet is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to trouble and those dishing it out. Social media of course, had welcomed the new rules, and any anonymous account speaking out against a popular idea could be quickly reported and thus indirectly permanently banned until they complied with real life details.
I try to say as much on the site - and while maybe I place a lot of blame on the relationship between the iPhone -> Increased adoption of internet usage -> Social Media usage going up == lots of detrimental effects I think you've an interesting thread i'd like to pull.
Do you have any more information or reading I can do on this and I can add it to the site?
Something changed between 2007 and now, there is just too much evidence to support that, and I think there is a very strong claim Smartphones are a very large contributing factor, but as you will be aware, the causes are very hard to extract.
I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)
Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.
But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.
Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.
[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680
[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars
Of course the ultimate cause is that the Internet changed from this mysterious third place full information to where we live our private and public life, where there's an unending torrent of things that affect us.
Smartphones and low-latency high-bandwidth ubiquitous wireless networks with large enough data quotas are the vector that facilitated this.
The nature of content changed from funny image macros with silly cats to weaponized out-of-context news videos (and reports, and studies, and data). From mostly boring IRC chatrooms full of cold quasi-autistic greybeards (or sometimes neurotic drama queens and kings) enforcing their idiosyncratic rules that allowed fun little interactions that were collection worthy on now almost forgotten websites (bash and qdb) to public Facebook posts and now to private group chats.
All this in front of the backdrop of global economic growth in its downturn. (The upsides of the China shock - and of globalization, in general - already reaped and now we're left with the boiling resentment coming from those who feel they were defrauded, who are attracted to narratives that dish out blame to elites and everybody close and far away in space and time.)
Previous presidents, infamous and obscure international organizations, and of course vague shadowy groups and half of the population all at once. Beancounters, the MBAs, real estate developers, private equity, CEOs, big pharma, WHO, toxic masculinity, LMBTQAI+, MAGA, and of course the DNC that caused all this by not letting Bernie became the nominee.
When people grow up with expectations that they'll live better than their parents and then that doesn't happen, we don't take it well.
And usually we see the highpoints of certain processes, like the skyscrapers that top out just before the market crash. (And rarely we hear about the unfinished ones, especially the ones left in drawers.)
With the Internet it feels that we had it in its romantic form in books and movies, then as it really arrived it turned into this really boring aspect of our lives, that nevertheless eat up all the better ones. (And we move less, eat worse, ruminate more on what we said and sent, worry about what we read and received.)
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Normal users joined Facebook not Google Reader. That's the whole point. (They have phones and Twitter and other bad hyper-palatable addictive platforms and whatever garbage apps their store gave them.)
Additionally no one was really closely monitoring the sleep quality of those who frequented the net, or those who were really engaged (near omni present) on the net pre 2005, but I don't recall thinking the conversations had back then were anything as borked as some ... most of the crud in some social media areas. I'm left with a sense, sensibility was much higher a couple of decades ago ... or one knew that they were going to be called out on whatever they said if it was in error.
2) We know what happened in 2007: the Global Financial Crisis.
Socioeconomic systems are complex. Most things have many causes and causes interact through feedback loops. It’s very hard to understand what’s happening. People keep pretending it’s easy and fixating on singular hypotheses that are almost certainly wrong.
I don’t think doom scrolling is healthy. I just doubt that it’s a single explanation.
Most of the graphs look more like “what happened in 2020.”
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen someone register a vanity domain for.
Saying «I know that correlation doesn’t imply causation», but then only demonstrating correlation isn’t really bringing this discourse any further.
Appreciate that extending the date range of data would improve the claims, as would adding more sources - but anything else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic#Causes_of_...