Jonathan Haidt

I'm 18. My parents did not moderate my smartphone usage, they just told me the harms that will result from phone addiction: life spent wastefully, especially in the critical years of middle and high school, bad grades, cognitive decay, vision decay, etc. I wised up and never get addicted to my phone ever, nor have used it for time-wasting distractions like social media. I hate those parents who restrict their kids' phone usage forcefully, they can't learn to use them safely. What happens when they grow up and be introduced to the world of unrestricted phone usage? Just kidding. I was an addict just like almost all other classmates of mine. I'm currently curing my myopia which is 4+ diopters in one eye thanks to using my iPhone 5 cms away my eyes, laying in bed countless nights. I was ~155 IQ (can't remember because of poor memory), now down to 150. My memory was the best I know among people, I used to never forget anything which I can classify as 'timelessly relevant info', so I would remember everything in a science book I read once three years ago (but not the yesterday's lunch). People would frequently comment about my memory and comprehension. Not so much, I wasn't able to remember things from the textbook the teacher is going to ask in late high school. Now my brain is still foggy, but I'm recovering. I'm very unfit, confirmed by a doctor, again recovering from that. I was in %0.5 in my country's university exam alhamdulillah, and I wonder how would it be if I have…

Jonathan Haidt has done a great job advocating this problem and is writing a book coming out this next year called "The Anxious Generation": https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/phone-free-schools https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide… This isn't something that can be solved with "better tech". It is something that is solved with "less tech" or "no tech" entirely. I wrote a book on this topic too as a millennial who grew up as one of the first waves of smartphones and social media users. I firmly believe it contributed to mental health challenges. We need to find a point where we say we've had "enough".

I commented this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating because actually reading the author's arguments (granted, in other writings, not OP) will allow you to see he's considered this point and is will to accept that causation works the other way around. It's a fair point. But what explains the uptick in depression and mental health issues starting around 2012, disproportionately impacting pre-teen girls and not contained to any geo. The author's entire point is that social media is the only explanation that that has been proposed [1]. Moreover, it's not a far-fetched explanation. He very aware that correlation does not provide causation, and that it could be the other way around. However, no one (according to him) has offered up a theory which explains the data like the social media theory does. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/ - I read a good post there and feel like "subscribing to give something back" but I don't pay. I don't have time/energy to read that much anymore. Same with a dozen others (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/, https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words)

I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread. Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1] COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2] If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide… [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report

> Facebook started off GREAT! I'm glad early fb was a good experience for you, but studies have found that when fb was just opening to universities, lower grades and higher demand for mental health services would follow. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

Self derogation means agreement with statements such as "I feel I do not have much to be proud of" and "sometimes I think I am no good at all" I found it strikingly similar to psychological abuse and manipulation tactics - to prevent a victim from defending themselves, convince them they're not worth defending. I linked to the tweet because I found that chart the most notable part of https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls

Not true. What statistics do you have here? I've been following Jonathan Haidts substack and he researches this extensively. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide… He cites multiple studies that talk about how the same trends are going on in other countries, and the same trends are occurring under similar timelines in places that receive high speed internet.

Why didn't Noah link to the best work being done on this right now? There's a huge, collaborative Google Doc https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

I am afraid that this will just lead down the path to what https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1718654143110512741 was mocking. We're dictating solutions to today's threats, leaving tomorrow to its own devices. But what will tomorrow bring? As Sam Altman warns in https://twitter.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174, superhuman persuasion is likely to be next. What does that mean? We've already had the problem of social media echo chambers leading to extremism, and online influencers creating cult-like followings. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls is a sober warning about the dangers to mental health from this. These are connected humans accidentally persuading each other. Now imagine AI being able to drive that intentionally to a particular political end. Then remember that China controls TikTok. Will Biden's order keep China from developing that capability? Will we develop tools to identify how that might be being actively used against us? I doubt both. Instead, we'll almost certainly get security theater leading to a regulatory moat. Which is almost certain to help profit margins at established AI companies. But is unlikely to address the likely future problems that haven't materialized yet.

What's often lost in a simple review of the history is that in modern times certain elements of the Unix philosophy [1] have become more important than ever. In fact as technology becomes more pervasive I would argue that the ideas it encapsulates are no longer only relevant to computer architecture, they're now relevant to the survival of a free and open society. This isn't just about how to build the best widget anymore (though I still think the Unix philosophy is a great contender for that). In particular I'm referring to the principles of composability and universal interfaces. These principles make the Unix philosophy inherently democratizing - when you apply it you're producing something that's intended to interoperate with other agents in a diverse ecosystem beyond your control. This is in stark contrast to the monoliths that tend to emerge from proprietary software development where the socioeconomic goals are to control everything strictly and limit interoperability because there's commercial value in having a "moat" or a "walled garden" which people can't escape. As computers become interwoven with our lives and our society the general purpose computer has become a tool like the printing press. The printing press was a precursor for democracy as we know it because it enabled the dissemination of information on a scale that was previously impossible. What sort of social progress we might ultimately achieve through the general purpose computer is yet to be fully…

> So far he hasn't turned into a domestic terrorist, and neither is he selling heroin for crypto on the dark web. Also, he has specific times when he can use his devices аnd limits on how much time. I think this sort of hyperbole is unhelpful. What people are worried about is more mundane: whether the hyperconnectedness will make their kids less happy in the short or long run. There is some evidence that the age of first smartphone negatively correlates with these outcomes. [1] For my daughters, I worry about social media use, body image issues, and the like. > Just delaying their first contact to the age of 13/14 won't magically guarantee they will be able to navigate it responsibly. This is just magical thinking born out of laziness. I don't think most parents think this would be a magic bullet. They just think that it is one (important) tool in the toolkit. We understand that parents (n) are supposed to parent (v). It's not lazy to say that we think our children would be better served if their brains were a bit more developed before they are confronted with the world of addictive apps and always-on social media. I'm glad to hear that things have worked out well for your kid. There are of course a variety of outcomes for different kinds of kids. No one knows whether their kid would have been happier (or would have grown into a happier adult) had they done something differently. We are all just trying to figure out how to do our best, and for some people that means…

The kid's mental health improved when she gave up her phone. So there is that and also some research that justifies the causation [1]. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

The data is well established that social media use by teens leads to worse mental health outcomes. I'm a parent and as my kids near the age in which social media becomes a thing, I started digging into. I had assumed it would be vague and filled with underpowered studies, but it's not. Social media is bad for kids and the data is very clear on it. This post has a list of the some of the better studies and gives a good synthesis of the results: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report

No this study is actually garbage. What it considers screen time is way too broad to be useful. People aren't worried about screens in general, but social media in particular as well as other smartphone applications that are engineered to keep you engaged. See Johnathan Haidt's literature review here for what an actually critical reading of the literature would lead you to reasonably conclude: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

Maybe? Parental controls aren’t a panacea. We set them for my older kids during high school. The older two pooled their allowance for three months and then had a friend at school order them an unlocked phone that they left in a locker they shared. Life, uh, finds a way… Most of the research I’ve seen suggests pretty clearly that it’s social media, and it affects girls more than boys. (And, yes, the effect appears to be causal—see [1] for a summary with citations.) The hard part is that the research also shows that the correct amount isn’t 0, it’s just that above a certain amount is really, really bad. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

I'm not as pessimistic as you. There is more and more evidence (https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-cri… that social media companies have essentially engineered a harmful addictive drug - at some point they will be held accountable. I do think we are going through the tobacco company phase, where the CEO's will stand before Congress and solemnly state they think their product is not harmful, and even if it is, it is a matter of "freedom" or something. "Just put down the phone" is this generation's Nancy Reagan "Just say no" moment. It was a joke amongst my young peers back in the day. But the real war on drugs, the War on Tobacco, has been incredibly effective - smoking used to be ubiquitous in the US, now it is just about gone. Social media, with attention-engineered timelines, is tobacco.

There's been a significant increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents since ~2012. It's not just business as usual, and it's significant enough that the same increase is visible in hospital admissions for self-harm. Social Media seems to be the only explanation that fits the timing and scale of the issue: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-cri…

A bit late to the party but I knew I've read this earlier on Hacker News but I couldn't find it earlier. This paper (with slightly different styling) is linked at the bottom of the article 'Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis' [0] discussed here [1] a few months ago. [0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-play-deficit [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36910256

Context: Jonathan Haidt, "The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012", https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic

Computers pre-social media were different. You could do a lot offline. Today, social media has been proven to be extremely toxic. There was a paper submitted to HN that mentions how much worse mental health is the earlier a child gets a cell phone[1]. Today children have unrestricted access to God knows what is on the internet and social media. This is not a recipe for success. Parents need to get involved. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report

Keep in mind there's a direct correlation between "screen time" and depression... Meaning that kids that spend 5+ hours per day on their phones are depressed. Up to one hour had no noticeable effects. [0] Now think about why a kid would self-isolate for 5 hours a day and it might give you a clue about why they are depressed in the first place (hint, it's not the magical screen!). [0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

It's true. This meta-analysis was posted a while back on HN with this key quote: "In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly... Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor. " Like I wrote in a comment back then, it's like blaming "computers" or "the internet". Vague to the point of useless. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wro…

From folks making the correlation vs causation argument here, I would like to hear their rebuttal to the points the author already laid out in this article https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide… especially the section on quasi experiments. Do we just think that because it is probably impossible to conduct pure double-blind RCTs in human populations, it is therefore impossible to reasonably attribute causality to anything on a social scale, and our efforts to understand and maybe even shape social outcomes are thus inherently pointless?

Jonathan Haidt has an interesting response to this (and related) criticisms: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wro…

This article is covering US teen girls but the negative pattern is the same in Denmark and likely other European countries. Jonanthan Haidt wrote an article on the subject: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

Saying "I don't want censorship" is equivalent to saying "I'm fine with people using my tool for coffee meetups, genocide planning, bridge club, and drug deals." It's an attempted handwashing of moral responsibility under the cover of software purity. At this point, it's pretty well documented that social media _as a tool_ has increased young female mental illness; the question is only "how much" [1]. To try to wave away responsibility for this by saying "but I'm just making a tool!" is beyond irresponsible at this point; it's morally reprehensible. [1]: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…

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

It isn't just social media, it is the combination of social media and smartphones. This makes social media far more pervasive in a teen's life. See section 6[0] where they discuss how mental health declines correlating with Facebook coming to college campuses and with high speed internet arriving in cities for some evidence. [0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epide…