>Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more of their time and crowding out these other activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.
Not the writer of the article, but, the article does point to mental disorder prevalence being explained by increased willingness to go and get diagnosed or to see something as a diagnosable condition, which also went way up in the 2010s. I think you can see that as a good or a bad thing, but it also means that we're looking at a readout where the methodology changed over the period where the results changed.
Also, you point out that these are examples of "bad things not happening" but those bad things are the sorts of things you would expect to correlate with an addiction, if addiction were actually what was happening. On the other hand, for any positive measure of flourishing you want to pick, you can always find one which is going down. You can look at disco declining in the 80s and call the 80s an unmitigated disaster where the youth are no longer doing enjoyable things. So now you need a basket of positives, which you're potentially comparing against each other, which is itself encoding values that people might just not be holding. I know people who live with their parents and are glad to because "why buy a house when you can save that same money or spend it on other things". I think Haidt's arguments often do a sleight of hand between these, where he constructs a cardboard maze where his values are treated as implicitly and unstatedly legitimate and everyone else's are treated as a pathology. Which, the addiction framing is quite convenient for, if that's what one is doing - any self assertion of "Actually, I'm fine" gets turned into "Wow, look at how deep the addiction goes".
> All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less.
I'm not sure the exception even holds. The data indicates that most high school dropouts end up going to work which is more than coasting through high school until graduation. It is not like the would-have-been dropouts have hunkered down working hard to become straight-A students. They're just there for the free ride, so to speak, with, as you suggest later on, no real consequences for just being physically present and doing nothing more. Staying in school is now the path of least resistance, lazy choice.
This was my take as well. Those all seem to be second order effects of people socializing much less, which must be having negative effects on kids as well?
The OP says that turned out fine even though he played an online video game for thousands of hours, and mentions he made friends to boot. He goes on to repeat this idea of "online connections". But screen time for young people (and old) today is not necessarily that; many of them are just consuming content from endless feeds and not building actual ties with other people. Modern social media is not a place for new friendships to blossom.
And it's getting harder and harder to tell if you're building actual ties to "people". We're not far from an article titled "I found out all my online friends are actual bots" being completely true. Worse online connections have barely been grounded in any physical reality as it is, and as more realistic AI takes over and gets cheaper to run god only knows how many "friend networks" will just be large scale subtle manipulation schemes.
Agreed, I think the author has some self-selection bias.
Also from article:
> They were coping mechanisms for [my] preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, ...
I would also suspect that some of those may be partially caused by second order effects of modern digital landscape. Even if we assume his own screen use is healthy that doesn't mean everyone else is the same.
The internet was just a better place, i also did similar stuff, and i remember i had forums i where i discussed niche hobbies and topics.
Lets not pretend modern internet addiction is the same, you are facing a fine tuned algoritm designed to keep you isolated and glued to your screen.
Even boomers are fallibg for it, my mom is watching ai slop shorts on facebook now...
Mine seems fine. She actively refused Facebook when it came out and still does, among other things. I've even tried to get her to check out Youtube because I was amazed about that out of everyone else addicted. Nope. She's still a mean woman, maybe that has a lot to do with it. I am happy for her.
This is what worries me. The services are deliberately designed to be addictive and the proven technique for that is making users angry and/or depressed, these two emotions are found to be the most "sticky" and revenue enhancing.
Yes and that he used it in his opening anecdote as an appeal to authority. Clearly demonstrates some bias. I don’t disagree with his statement that many factors are at play however it is a biased article rather than one I would expect from a PhD in the way it’s written.
Oh, the think tank is a "project of the Cato Institute". So this essay is just ideological right-wing driven drivel. Trying to deflect blame off big tech and societal problems and place them entirely on the individual. Libertarian fantasies.
> Oh, the think tank is a "project of the Cato Institute". So this essay is just ideological right-wing driven drivel. Trying to deflect blame off big tech and societal problems and place them entirely on the individual. Libertarian fantasies.
Look man, businesses can do no wrong, because a business that did wrong would immediately fail, therefore we can infer that all existing businesses are doing good things that people want. QED, science fact.
The real problem with society is all those uppity people who are racist against businesses and the wealthy.
I'm a little under halfway through Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. I feel like OP is arguing against a different version of the book than the one I'm currently reading.
First, Haidt's arguments primarily pertain to public schools and he spends significantly more time on the impact of social media on girls than on boys. The main problems he cites are that social media is creating a substitute for in person, synchronous, high stakes social relationships.
An isolated home schooler's use of social media is not substituting other, richer opportunities that are available.
In addition, Haidt strongly argues against social trends that long predate social media and mobile phones: the overprotection of children and elimination of unsupervised, child-led play in real world situations (specifically where there is physical risk taking).
Based on my read so far, OP is exactly the profile of a person who would have benefited from online social relationships.
It's possible for both to be true: mobile phone use is toxic children who are substituting online relationships for real world interactions. Mobile phone use is beneficial for children who do not have opportunity for real world interactions with peers.
Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.
Even single player games have adopted these practices. It’s in retrospect not surprising that roguelikes became so popular, but I think it’s very unhealthy that a game like Balatro is considered one of the exemplars of the video game medium. It activates almost exactly the same emotions as gambling and its no surprise that people spend hundreds of hours on them, but its almost certainly bad for the consumer even if they’re not losing money
But my experience seems so much more important and real than everyone else’s!
It’s in the headline. This is a classic of the “trends” genre — author generalizing their own experience to make a pronouncement about a whole generation or all of society.
This is the problem. People extrapolate from their own experience, especially with regard to childhood and children, and related experiences such as education.
I do not think "screens" per se are harmful, but what people do on screens. Read an ebook? Play chess? Watch a film? Doomscroll?
They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.
"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "
Depends on what you mean by computer programming. Are you solving hard problems? Are you reasoning about them, or throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks?
I would imagine computer programming does cause a mental fatigue, but your brain is very awake (unless you're just pulling the handle on the slop machine...)
If one's mind has been "destroyed", would you know?
It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.
We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.
> If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.
I looked into it a bit and the "mental health crisis" of young people wildly differs by country. I think US and UK have a marked rise, but in other EU countries nothing like that is going on, it's a stable trend. So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
Really? "For the first time WHO Regional Office for Europe brings together all of data available at the Regional level on child and youth mental health. One in seven children and adolescents aged 0–19 years old lives with a mental health condition, and this number is increasing over time. Females are particularly affected with one in four females aged 15–19 years old living with a mental health condition."
> So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
Mobile phone and social media use are more or less stable under young people. It practically cannot grow since quite a while now.
Interesting. Do they have historical charts? I don't remember the source, but it was interesting to compare over the past 1-2 decades for each country.
What an absurd take. Comparing decades-old video games to modern social media is completely off-base. Sure, both are experienced with a screen, but that's about where the similarities end. It'd be like a pharmacist who used to smoke cigarettes back in high school writing an article discussing opioid addiction titled "Molecules Aren't Destroying Adult Minds. I Should Know".
Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.
Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.
Less crime, fewer teen pregnancies, less smoking, less drug use, and lower high-school drop-out rates are also coincident with concerns about screen time and social media use. By the same "correlation is not causation" argument, these have nothing to do with each other. It's great that these things are trending in the right direction. But there are still a whole lot of mental health problems among pre-teens, teens, and younger adults.
Not all screen time is the same. Some of it is really beneficial to mental health, and some of it isn't.
For me, the concerns about mental health and screen time come more from issues of body image distortions, bullying, slot-machine mechanics to maximize engagement, and the somewhat rare but abhorrent behavior of some corners of the internet that encourage people to commit suicide. I'm sure there are more examples than this as well.
Okay now I'm kind of annoyed by this author's claims. They cite a meta-analysis while claiming: "... a 2024 analysis ... found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent"
Following that link and reading the RESULTS paragraph: "The 143 studies reviewed included 1 094 890 adolescents and 886 effect sizes, 11% of which examined clinical samples. In these samples, a positive and significant meta-correlation was found between social media use and internalizing symptoms, both for time spent (n = 2893; r, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.18; P = .02; I2, 24.59) and user engagement (n = 859; r, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.15; P = .002; I2, 82.67). These associations mirrored those in community samples."
POSITIVE AND SIGNIFICANT meta-correlation.
WTF? This is just blatant lying by the author. I mean sure they could claim the effect is, in their opinion, relatively small, but the study claims the exact opposite of what the author of the article claims!
Adam Omary is a research scholar for the libertarian-leaning Cato institute [0].
While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.
Wow. I could not disagree more with this author, but I was looking for any evidence he could offer other than his credentials (he's from Harvard and 26) and being part of the Generation that author Jonathan Haidt of, "The Anxious Generation" indicated was struggling the most with screens and social media.
I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.
This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.
I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!
He's writing for a side project of the Cato Institute. That think tank is one of the big reasons we're in the hot mess we are in. The essay isn't coming from an intellectually honest place. The libertarian mindset is the key driver here rather than any actual data.
The entire article is "trust me bro, I used to be addicted, but now I have a PhD."
I mean, come on.
First claim in the article:
> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."
Another claim from the article:
> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.
I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.
I have to agree that the screen narrative is often overly simplistic and perhaps functions as a convenient scapegoat for the other failures (family instability, an absent father, etc.). People are always trying to look for ways to absolve themselves of their responsibility. I think the author makes a good point here. For instance, if your father is uninvolved and your family life is unhealthy (pathological, absent, or smothering), social media on phones are an obvious escape that's within easy reach. With the disintegration of all sorts of social common places (look at the emptiness of playgrounds today), the snowball effect of social media use, and the shift of incentives the existence of social media introduce, social media become increasingly entrenched.
That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.
So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.
"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."
I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.
>Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more of their time and crowding out these other activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.
And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.
Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.
Not the writer of the article, but, the article does point to mental disorder prevalence being explained by increased willingness to go and get diagnosed or to see something as a diagnosable condition, which also went way up in the 2010s. I think you can see that as a good or a bad thing, but it also means that we're looking at a readout where the methodology changed over the period where the results changed.
Also, you point out that these are examples of "bad things not happening" but those bad things are the sorts of things you would expect to correlate with an addiction, if addiction were actually what was happening. On the other hand, for any positive measure of flourishing you want to pick, you can always find one which is going down. You can look at disco declining in the 80s and call the 80s an unmitigated disaster where the youth are no longer doing enjoyable things. So now you need a basket of positives, which you're potentially comparing against each other, which is itself encoding values that people might just not be holding. I know people who live with their parents and are glad to because "why buy a house when you can save that same money or spend it on other things". I think Haidt's arguments often do a sleight of hand between these, where he constructs a cardboard maze where his values are treated as implicitly and unstatedly legitimate and everyone else's are treated as a pathology. Which, the addiction framing is quite convenient for, if that's what one is doing - any self assertion of "Actually, I'm fine" gets turned into "Wow, look at how deep the addiction goes".
> All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less.
I'm not sure the exception even holds. The data indicates that most high school dropouts end up going to work which is more than coasting through high school until graduation. It is not like the would-have-been dropouts have hunkered down working hard to become straight-A students. They're just there for the free ride, so to speak, with, as you suggest later on, no real consequences for just being physically present and doing nothing more. Staying in school is now the path of least resistance, lazy choice.
This was my take as well. Those all seem to be second order effects of people socializing much less, which must be having negative effects on kids as well?
The OP says that turned out fine even though he played an online video game for thousands of hours, and mentions he made friends to boot. He goes on to repeat this idea of "online connections". But screen time for young people (and old) today is not necessarily that; many of them are just consuming content from endless feeds and not building actual ties with other people. Modern social media is not a place for new friendships to blossom.
And it's getting harder and harder to tell if you're building actual ties to "people". We're not far from an article titled "I found out all my online friends are actual bots" being completely true. Worse online connections have barely been grounded in any physical reality as it is, and as more realistic AI takes over and gets cheaper to run god only knows how many "friend networks" will just be large scale subtle manipulation schemes.
Dead Internet Theory becomes less prescient each day.
Agreed, I think the author has some self-selection bias.
Also from article:
> They were coping mechanisms for [my] preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, ...
I would also suspect that some of those may be partially caused by second order effects of modern digital landscape. Even if we assume his own screen use is healthy that doesn't mean everyone else is the same.
The internet was just a better place, i also did similar stuff, and i remember i had forums i where i discussed niche hobbies and topics.
Lets not pretend modern internet addiction is the same, you are facing a fine tuned algoritm designed to keep you isolated and glued to your screen. Even boomers are fallibg for it, my mom is watching ai slop shorts on facebook now...
Mine seems fine. She actively refused Facebook when it came out and still does, among other things. I've even tried to get her to check out Youtube because I was amazed about that out of everyone else addicted. Nope. She's still a mean woman, maybe that has a lot to do with it. I am happy for her.
I agree. A 25 year old making friends raiding in WoW is a lot different than an 8 year old swiping on an iPad.
Also the friends you don't get from real life aren't compensated by the ones you get online. Also just life experience.
And everyone thinks they're fine. When I was 25, I was still afraid of eating at restaurants. But I thought I turned out fine.
This is what worries me. The services are deliberately designed to be addictive and the proven technique for that is making users angry and/or depressed, these two emotions are found to be the most "sticky" and revenue enhancing.
How can a research fellow so blatantly use anecdotal evidence?!?!
The same way scientists for tobacco companies back in the day never found cancer connections. $$$ and ideology.
He's a research fellow at a politico-economic thinktank, not academia. But it is disappointing given that he also has a PhD from Harvard.
Yes and that he used it in his opening anecdote as an appeal to authority. Clearly demonstrates some bias. I don’t disagree with his statement that many factors are at play however it is a biased article rather than one I would expect from a PhD in the way it’s written.
Oh, the think tank is a "project of the Cato Institute". So this essay is just ideological right-wing driven drivel. Trying to deflect blame off big tech and societal problems and place them entirely on the individual. Libertarian fantasies.
> Oh, the think tank is a "project of the Cato Institute". So this essay is just ideological right-wing driven drivel. Trying to deflect blame off big tech and societal problems and place them entirely on the individual. Libertarian fantasies.
Look man, businesses can do no wrong, because a business that did wrong would immediately fail, therefore we can infer that all existing businesses are doing good things that people want. QED, science fact.
The real problem with society is all those uppity people who are racist against businesses and the wealthy.
I'm a little under halfway through Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. I feel like OP is arguing against a different version of the book than the one I'm currently reading.
First, Haidt's arguments primarily pertain to public schools and he spends significantly more time on the impact of social media on girls than on boys. The main problems he cites are that social media is creating a substitute for in person, synchronous, high stakes social relationships.
An isolated home schooler's use of social media is not substituting other, richer opportunities that are available.
In addition, Haidt strongly argues against social trends that long predate social media and mobile phones: the overprotection of children and elimination of unsupervised, child-led play in real world situations (specifically where there is physical risk taking).
Based on my read so far, OP is exactly the profile of a person who would have benefited from online social relationships.
It's possible for both to be true: mobile phone use is toxic children who are substituting online relationships for real world interactions. Mobile phone use is beneficial for children who do not have opportunity for real world interactions with peers.
Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.
And even gaming has been largely "gamified" into microtransaction casinos rather than a place to hang with friends.
Even single player games have adopted these practices. It’s in retrospect not surprising that roguelikes became so popular, but I think it’s very unhealthy that a game like Balatro is considered one of the exemplars of the video game medium. It activates almost exactly the same emotions as gambling and its no surprise that people spend hundreds of hours on them, but its almost certainly bad for the consumer even if they’re not losing money
> Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.
Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.
But my experience seems so much more important and real than everyone else’s!
It’s in the headline. This is a classic of the “trends” genre — author generalizing their own experience to make a pronouncement about a whole generation or all of society.
This is the problem. People extrapolate from their own experience, especially with regard to childhood and children, and related experiences such as education.
I do not think "screens" per se are harmful, but what people do on screens. Read an ebook? Play chess? Watch a film? Doomscroll?
At least one controlled study supports this: (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50354-3)
They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.
"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "
What about 45 minutes of computer programming? Doesn't that reduce cognitive performance as well?
Depends on the programming language. :-)
Depends on what you mean by computer programming. Are you solving hard problems? Are you reasoning about them, or throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks?
I would imagine computer programming does cause a mental fatigue, but your brain is very awake (unless you're just pulling the handle on the slop machine...)
If one's mind has been "destroyed", would you know?
It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.
We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.
> If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.
I looked into it a bit and the "mental health crisis" of young people wildly differs by country. I think US and UK have a marked rise, but in other EU countries nothing like that is going on, it's a stable trend. So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
Really? "For the first time WHO Regional Office for Europe brings together all of data available at the Regional level on child and youth mental health. One in seven children and adolescents aged 0–19 years old lives with a mental health condition, and this number is increasing over time. Females are particularly affected with one in four females aged 15–19 years old living with a mental health condition."
> So IMHO it's quite unlikely that "social media" is the cause, because they are more global.
Mobile phone and social media use are more or less stable under young people. It practically cannot grow since quite a while now.
Interesting. Do they have historical charts? I don't remember the source, but it was interesting to compare over the past 1-2 decades for each country.
What an absurd take. Comparing decades-old video games to modern social media is completely off-base. Sure, both are experienced with a screen, but that's about where the similarities end. It'd be like a pharmacist who used to smoke cigarettes back in high school writing an article discussing opioid addiction titled "Molecules Aren't Destroying Adult Minds. I Should Know".
Video gaming, particularly MMORPGs, were highly social experiences. WoW guildmasters received valuable organizational management skills, and I'm aware of a CTO who explicitly said his WoW experiences helps him manage people in professional settings.
Browsing social media is an antisocial activity, given that you're passively seeing what others are doing; reactions and comments don't count as a social activity because it's not real-time interaction with a human. Social media is engineered to maximize engagement by putting mostly negative content (that is, content that annoys you) in your feed interspersed with some positive content. It's weaponized behavioral psychology.
Less crime, fewer teen pregnancies, less smoking, less drug use, and lower high-school drop-out rates are also coincident with concerns about screen time and social media use. By the same "correlation is not causation" argument, these have nothing to do with each other. It's great that these things are trending in the right direction. But there are still a whole lot of mental health problems among pre-teens, teens, and younger adults.
Not all screen time is the same. Some of it is really beneficial to mental health, and some of it isn't.
For me, the concerns about mental health and screen time come more from issues of body image distortions, bullying, slot-machine mechanics to maximize engagement, and the somewhat rare but abhorrent behavior of some corners of the internet that encourage people to commit suicide. I'm sure there are more examples than this as well.
Okay now I'm kind of annoyed by this author's claims. They cite a meta-analysis while claiming: "... a 2024 analysis ... found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent"
Following that link and reading the RESULTS paragraph: "The 143 studies reviewed included 1 094 890 adolescents and 886 effect sizes, 11% of which examined clinical samples. In these samples, a positive and significant meta-correlation was found between social media use and internalizing symptoms, both for time spent (n = 2893; r, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.18; P = .02; I2, 24.59) and user engagement (n = 859; r, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.15; P = .002; I2, 82.67). These associations mirrored those in community samples."
POSITIVE AND SIGNIFICANT meta-correlation.
WTF? This is just blatant lying by the author. I mean sure they could claim the effect is, in their opinion, relatively small, but the study claims the exact opposite of what the author of the article claims!
Adam Omary is a research scholar for the libertarian-leaning Cato institute [0].
While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.
[0]: https://www.cato.org/people/adam-omary
> Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.
What?
Wow. I could not disagree more with this author, but I was looking for any evidence he could offer other than his credentials (he's from Harvard and 26) and being part of the Generation that author Jonathan Haidt of, "The Anxious Generation" indicated was struggling the most with screens and social media.
I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.
This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.
I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!
He's writing for a side project of the Cato Institute. That think tank is one of the big reasons we're in the hot mess we are in. The essay isn't coming from an intellectually honest place. The libertarian mindset is the key driver here rather than any actual data.
The entire article is "trust me bro, I used to be addicted, but now I have a PhD."
I mean, come on.
First claim in the article:
> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."
Another claim from the article:
> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.
I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.
I have to agree that the screen narrative is often overly simplistic and perhaps functions as a convenient scapegoat for the other failures (family instability, an absent father, etc.). People are always trying to look for ways to absolve themselves of their responsibility. I think the author makes a good point here. For instance, if your father is uninvolved and your family life is unhealthy (pathological, absent, or smothering), social media on phones are an obvious escape that's within easy reach. With the disintegration of all sorts of social common places (look at the emptiness of playgrounds today), the snowball effect of social media use, and the shift of incentives the existence of social media introduce, social media become increasingly entrenched.
That being said, we cannot discount the manner in which social media do affect people once they've been pulled in. I think most people who have left social media have noticed the reduction of what you might call psychological turbulence. Social media companies are for-profit and morally nihilistic, and like drug dealers, they have an interest in keeping people hooked, often through harmful means. Social media companies are not acting in the best interest of their users. They are acting in the financial interest of their clients and their own pockets. And the software architecture of phones can act as an enabler, like a pocket slot machine, by design.
So it's not either/or. It's more of a question of where you ought to assign responsibility for which observed facts.
"Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts."
I don't know how impressive these statistics are. What needs to be considered are the causes. Like, sure, fewer teen pregnancies and less drug use sounds good on paper, but why are these the case? Is it because teens are more virtuous and responsible today? Is it because they've become more selective about who they hang out with, avoiding contact with bad influences? Is it because family life is healthy and models healthy relations? Or is the reason simply a lack of opportunity, because of total social isolation, social underdevelopment, lack of access, or pornography use? The murder rate might drop if you cut off everyone's hands, but I would hardly consider that a victory.
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