As a teacher I saw the wolves arrive in my classroom around 2011-12.
The wolves came in and stole my students' most precious asset -- their attention. The usurpers were too smart, too manipulative and brazenly uncaring. Here I was, at a teacher’s salary, pitted against youthful MENSA app developers in Silicon Valley whose pay scales and IQs exceed mine by factors of 100.
I saw the "causation" unfold right before my eyes.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't “structural discrimination, racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and economic hardship" existed for centuries?The opioid epidemic is a recent phenomenon, yes, as is social isolation (one that is CLEARLY related to social media), so it seems that Odgers is really grasping here.
I'm also fed up with the need to quantify everything, all the time, to justify taking action. Studies! Data! Research! Feh. Spend an hour with your average teenager today and you'll have all the evidence you need.
Keep up the excellent work, John. I'm grateful for you.
As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have seen an alarming escalation in the last year of adolescents, mostly female, with multiple hospitalizations, multiple suicide attempts, multiple therapists, multiple medications, multiple somatic disorders, some declaring as being 'trans', most attending schools which are triage units for mental illness and disruptive behavior, most coming from broken families or from chaotic homes with checked out parents. It's tragic, and we in the mental health services, are not equipped as the old models and theories and tools and techniques and medications are failing our nation's youth.
Odgers website claims that her research foundation is receiving millions of dollars in grants from the Swiss based Jacobs Foundation ($11 million in 2021 alone).
the Jacobs Foundation is a full on technocratic institution focused on getting more, not less, technology into childrens hands by 2030 (they have spent over 545 million and have billions in endowments). I think this more than anything explains Odgers very thin Nature article.
Haidt and Twenges work is being attacked because they are right. every parent with their eyes open can see it. the gaslighting from the technocrats will continue tho...
Now we need a study to determine whether the relationship between the decision by "Nature" to publish a weak, hostile critique of Haidt, on the one hand, and his commitment to heterodoxy, on the other hand, is one of correlation or causation?
There exist large online "communities" of young people (girls), specifically on Instagram, with dysphoric teens competing for who has the most acute symptoms of psychological disorders.
The "sicker" you are, the more "likes" you get. It is truly deranged.
It seems strange for Odgers to criticize the authors' work for mistaking correlation with causation while also positing a possible cause (Great Financial Crisis) without any proof that it is truly causal rather than correlational.
> The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
The lesson is we should disconnect the alarm *puller.* Because we know that the wolf eventually does come, and that if enough false alarms happen, people become desensitized and stop listening even when true alarms do happen, the only sensible thing to do is to fire The Boy and get a better watchman. Take false alarms seriously and punish those who knowingly generate them, for kicks or for political reasons.
God bless you Jonathan Haidt! Clear, concise, educated and urgent. Thanks for amplifying our scattered concerns and for cutting through the nonsensical arguments. A hero of our time.
Please note that you misquoted the Brailovskaia et al. (2022) study - the participants were assigned to reduce their social media use BY half an hour a day, rather than TO 30 minutes.
By the way, the methodology of that study is rather problematic - with a highly homogeneous sample and using self-reporting for both compliance with the protocol and results of the intervention - which undermine the validity and generalisability of the conclusions.
Perhaps not the best choice of example to prove your point.
Jonathan, I have come across a group of people online who claim the online social life is good for their kids. I of course totally disagree and think they’re setting their kids up for more isolation. These groups are from Parents of 2e kids. I speculate that it’s because kids who are intellectually gifted but social challenged find it hard to build friendships in real life (though often these kids are highly managed by adults all the time, as many have IEPs or 504s that require them to have a paraprofessional with them).
It would be interesting to research this cohort and their children. My own daughter is 6. She is profoundly gifted, but often acts like a 3 year old due to ADHD (big family history from my husbands side of 2e). But we give her more opportunities practice social skills in real life, and no screens beyond TV.
To give you an example of the parent’s (mostly the moms) thinking, they say things like it’s cruel to deny your child something they enjoy (we’re talking elementary schoolers here!), and that putting restrictions Denies the kid’s IDENTITY (yes, their identity is who they are online).
These parents are convinced their kids NEED the social media and gaming worlds because otherwise they’d be too isolated IRL.
Just wondering if you’d come across this attitude? I doubt it’s a widespread opinion but very concentrated in these types of groups.
I think that all of the talk about correlation and causality misses a larger point which is that a very testable hypnosis has been put forward-a hypnosis that can be tested in so many ways. How often does that come along in the behavioral sciences? In that spirit, remember that Darwin's Origin of Species was largely a lot of correlational data from which he formulated a great testable idea. We have here a really testable idea, which I think is a tremendous contribution. (And I am aware J Haidt is arguing that it more than correlational data-but it is the testable idea that I really like)
'Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.'
Or maybe Odgers is blinded by her own urge to promote ideological "science", aka Lysenkoism. Social science has been especially plagued by the partisan infiltration of progressive/Post-modern/critical theory warriors. The best we can say about them is that they can't see beyond their doctrine. If we are less forgiving we might think their "anti-racism" promotes the structural racism narrative at every opportunity.
Saying this is not proper academic debate etiquette, but since I'm just an anonymous commenter who fled academia many years ago: Does anyone believe that Odgers' claims are not influenced, perhaps wholly determined, by her ideology and politics?
Part of Odgers' intuition is correct: it's not just that the medium is the message, it's also due to the specific message in the medium. But she guessed the wrong harmful messages.
A clue lies in teen girls being more harmed than teen boys. Females on average have different receptors for mind viruses than males. And forums such as Tumblr have been doing gain-of-function research on mind viruses for teen girls for the past 15 years or so. That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
So I'd argue that mind viruses and their ever-evolving mutations are the true culprit, and these messages are merely fine-tuned to exploit the medium that Jonathan has identified. Yes, woke-ism and its variants are the primary attack vector, but there are others.
It's tempting to assign malicious intent to the sources of the mind viruses, and there may be some opportunity to rightly do so, but in general, viruses have no sense of morality or ill-will, their only purpose is self-propagation. Think of it like COVID and its variants. Sure, GoF and a lab leak might have jump-started it, but viruses have a mind of their own that is purely about exploiting whatever receptors they can find.
Unfortunately the incentive for social media companies is to make everything a superspreader event. The medium is virality for any message.
Jonathan's solution really does help: "social distancing" from social media.
As a teacher I saw the wolves arrive in my classroom around 2011-12.
The wolves came in and stole my students' most precious asset -- their attention. The usurpers were too smart, too manipulative and brazenly uncaring. Here I was, at a teacher’s salary, pitted against youthful MENSA app developers in Silicon Valley whose pay scales and IQs exceed mine by factors of 100.
I saw the "causation" unfold right before my eyes.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't “structural discrimination, racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and economic hardship" existed for centuries?The opioid epidemic is a recent phenomenon, yes, as is social isolation (one that is CLEARLY related to social media), so it seems that Odgers is really grasping here.
I'm also fed up with the need to quantify everything, all the time, to justify taking action. Studies! Data! Research! Feh. Spend an hour with your average teenager today and you'll have all the evidence you need.
Keep up the excellent work, John. I'm grateful for you.
Your four recommendations cannot be any more logical or evolutionarily supported.
No phone, no social media, play outside with some risk.
The leap forward is by taking a slight step backward.
This is a good fight.
As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have seen an alarming escalation in the last year of adolescents, mostly female, with multiple hospitalizations, multiple suicide attempts, multiple therapists, multiple medications, multiple somatic disorders, some declaring as being 'trans', most attending schools which are triage units for mental illness and disruptive behavior, most coming from broken families or from chaotic homes with checked out parents. It's tragic, and we in the mental health services, are not equipped as the old models and theories and tools and techniques and medications are failing our nation's youth.
follow the money.
Odgers website claims that her research foundation is receiving millions of dollars in grants from the Swiss based Jacobs Foundation ($11 million in 2021 alone).
the Jacobs Foundation is a full on technocratic institution focused on getting more, not less, technology into childrens hands by 2030 (they have spent over 545 million and have billions in endowments). I think this more than anything explains Odgers very thin Nature article.
Haidt and Twenges work is being attacked because they are right. every parent with their eyes open can see it. the gaslighting from the technocrats will continue tho...
Now we need a study to determine whether the relationship between the decision by "Nature" to publish a weak, hostile critique of Haidt, on the one hand, and his commitment to heterodoxy, on the other hand, is one of correlation or causation?
There exist large online "communities" of young people (girls), specifically on Instagram, with dysphoric teens competing for who has the most acute symptoms of psychological disorders.
The "sicker" you are, the more "likes" you get. It is truly deranged.
It seems strange for Odgers to criticize the authors' work for mistaking correlation with causation while also positing a possible cause (Great Financial Crisis) without any proof that it is truly causal rather than correlational.
> The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
The lesson is we should disconnect the alarm *puller.* Because we know that the wolf eventually does come, and that if enough false alarms happen, people become desensitized and stop listening even when true alarms do happen, the only sensible thing to do is to fire The Boy and get a better watchman. Take false alarms seriously and punish those who knowingly generate them, for kicks or for political reasons.
God bless you Jonathan Haidt! Clear, concise, educated and urgent. Thanks for amplifying our scattered concerns and for cutting through the nonsensical arguments. A hero of our time.
Please note that you misquoted the Brailovskaia et al. (2022) study - the participants were assigned to reduce their social media use BY half an hour a day, rather than TO 30 minutes.
By the way, the methodology of that study is rather problematic - with a highly homogeneous sample and using self-reporting for both compliance with the protocol and results of the intervention - which undermine the validity and generalisability of the conclusions.
Perhaps not the best choice of example to prove your point.
Jonathan, I have come across a group of people online who claim the online social life is good for their kids. I of course totally disagree and think they’re setting their kids up for more isolation. These groups are from Parents of 2e kids. I speculate that it’s because kids who are intellectually gifted but social challenged find it hard to build friendships in real life (though often these kids are highly managed by adults all the time, as many have IEPs or 504s that require them to have a paraprofessional with them).
It would be interesting to research this cohort and their children. My own daughter is 6. She is profoundly gifted, but often acts like a 3 year old due to ADHD (big family history from my husbands side of 2e). But we give her more opportunities practice social skills in real life, and no screens beyond TV.
To give you an example of the parent’s (mostly the moms) thinking, they say things like it’s cruel to deny your child something they enjoy (we’re talking elementary schoolers here!), and that putting restrictions Denies the kid’s IDENTITY (yes, their identity is who they are online).
These parents are convinced their kids NEED the social media and gaming worlds because otherwise they’d be too isolated IRL.
Just wondering if you’d come across this attitude? I doubt it’s a widespread opinion but very concentrated in these types of groups.
I think that all of the talk about correlation and causality misses a larger point which is that a very testable hypnosis has been put forward-a hypnosis that can be tested in so many ways. How often does that come along in the behavioral sciences? In that spirit, remember that Darwin's Origin of Species was largely a lot of correlational data from which he formulated a great testable idea. We have here a really testable idea, which I think is a tremendous contribution. (And I am aware J Haidt is arguing that it more than correlational data-but it is the testable idea that I really like)
'Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.'
Or maybe Odgers is blinded by her own urge to promote ideological "science", aka Lysenkoism. Social science has been especially plagued by the partisan infiltration of progressive/Post-modern/critical theory warriors. The best we can say about them is that they can't see beyond their doctrine. If we are less forgiving we might think their "anti-racism" promotes the structural racism narrative at every opportunity.
Saying this is not proper academic debate etiquette, but since I'm just an anonymous commenter who fled academia many years ago: Does anyone believe that Odgers' claims are not influenced, perhaps wholly determined, by her ideology and politics?
Part of Odgers' intuition is correct: it's not just that the medium is the message, it's also due to the specific message in the medium. But she guessed the wrong harmful messages.
A clue lies in teen girls being more harmed than teen boys. Females on average have different receptors for mind viruses than males. And forums such as Tumblr have been doing gain-of-function research on mind viruses for teen girls for the past 15 years or so. That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
So I'd argue that mind viruses and their ever-evolving mutations are the true culprit, and these messages are merely fine-tuned to exploit the medium that Jonathan has identified. Yes, woke-ism and its variants are the primary attack vector, but there are others.
It's tempting to assign malicious intent to the sources of the mind viruses, and there may be some opportunity to rightly do so, but in general, viruses have no sense of morality or ill-will, their only purpose is self-propagation. Think of it like COVID and its variants. Sure, GoF and a lab leak might have jump-started it, but viruses have a mind of their own that is purely about exploiting whatever receptors they can find.
Unfortunately the incentive for social media companies is to make everything a superspreader event. The medium is virality for any message.
Jonathan's solution really does help: "social distancing" from social media.