<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/22/jonathan-haidts-book-the-anxious-generation-is-coddling-the-american-parent-giving-them-clear-simple-wrong-explanations-for-whats-ailing-teens/>
"Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” has become a
NY Times
bestseller, and he’s making media appearances basically everywhere you look,
telling people that social media has “rewired children’s minds” and that it is
uniquely harmful.
We’ve talked about Haidt in the past, and especially his ability to
consistently cherry-pick and misread the actual data on such things.
Haidt is telling a story a lot of people
want to hear. The world has some
very real problems happening these days, and it’s clear, simple, and ultimately
wrong to be able to blame them on social media. It’s just that, in getting the
diagnosis wrong, it lets people feel better about themselves, while brushing
away actual real problems and doing the hard work of trying to dig up
solutions.
The Daily Beast asked if I would review the book for them, and they’ve now
published over 2000 words I wrote about the myriad problems of Haidt’s book.
I’m not going to repeat it here, so please go read it over there, as I put a
lot of time into that review.
But, as a quick summary: he’s wrong on the data, which undermines his entire
argument. Almost every single expert in the field who does actual research on
these issues says so. Candice Odgers ripped apart his misleading use of data in
Nature. Andrew Przybylski, who has done multiple, detailed studies using
massive amounts of data going back years, and keeps finding little to no
evidence of the things Haidt claims, has talked about the problems in Haidt’s
data. Ditto Jeff Hancock, at Stanford, who recently helped put together the
National Academies of Sciences report on social media and adolescent health
(which also did not find what Haidt found).
Indeed, one thing that came up in looking over the “strongest” research in the
book was that (contrary to some of Haidt’s claims), data outside of the US on
suicide rates seem to show they’re often (not always) going down, not up. Even
worse, the data on depression in the US showing an increase in depression rates
among kids is almost certainly due to changes in screening practices for
depression and how suicide ideation is recorded."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
