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Anastasis

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Posts posted by Anastasis

  1. On 3/30/2024 at 8:34 PM, HenryJames said:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

    Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

    Haidt's response. "Ironically" via social media. 

     

    Quote

     

    A review in Nature, by

    @candice_odgers

    , asserts 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.” Both of these assertions are untrue. https://nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2…

    @zachmrausch

    and I have been collecting the published studies on both sides since 2019, organizing them, and making them available for public viewing and commenting, in multiple Google docs available here: https://anxiousgeneration.com/resources/collaborative-review-docs… In the “social media and mental health” doc, we currently list 22 experimental studies (16 of which found significant evidence of harm) and 9 quasi-experiments (8 of which found evidence of harm. Odgers cited only the 9th one.) We also examine the many meta-analyses and review papers. I lay out the evidence for causality (not just correlation) and walk the reader through the Google doc in this post at After Babel: https://afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic… People really need to stop saying that the evidence is “just correlational.” Sure, there are a lot of correlational studies (79 in our Google doc, of which 64 found significant correlations with variables related to poor mental health.) But there are also many experiments supporting my claims of causation. I’ll write a post at http://Afterbabel.com in April responding more fully to the arguments of the skeptics (including Odgers). For now, I point interested readers to a post in which I laid out 6 problems with the way that the skeptics have conceptualized the debate: https://afterbabel.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong… I just want to note two more problems with Odgers’ review. First: She says that I am offering a simplistic one-factor explanation: it’s social media! But I am not. My story is about two major factors (end of the play-based childhood, rise of the phone-based childhood), each of which has many components that bring a variety of harms to different children in different ways. My book is full of lists of causal pathways. There is no one causal pathway that, on its own, explains “the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt.” Yet when you add up all the different ways that the phone-based childhood is harming different kids, some of which we learned about in that Senate hearing on January 31, you end up with a lot of kids being harmed in many ways, and these many harms combined can easily explain the “large effects” even though most pathways affect only a subset of kids. Yet Odgers and the other skeptics focus intently on studies that operationalize social media in one crude way (total # of hours per day), and then correlate that number with some measure of anxiety, depression, or other mental ailment. When the correlations turn out to be around r = .15 for girls (which is actually a number we agree on, as I explain in the previous link), the skeptics conclude that this is not large enough--by itself--to explain the epidemic, so social media must be only a trivial contributor to the epidemic. This is an error caused by an overly narrow operationalization of a complex phenomenon: the radical transformation of daily life that happened for teens between 2010 and 2015. Only a sliver of the story is captured by the crude measure of “hours per day” on social media. The skeptics’ skepticism would be more compelling if they had an alternative explanation for the multi-national decline in mental health that happened in the early 2010s, but they do not. Odgers claims that the “real causes” of the crisis, from which my book “might distract us from effectively responding,” are the lingering effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which had lasting effects on “families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution,” who were “also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.” I agree that those things are all bad for human development, but Odgers’ theory cannot explain why rates of anxiety and depression were generally flat in the 2000s and then suddenly shot upward roughly four years after the start of the Global Financial Crisis. Did life in America suddenly get that much worse during President Obama’s 2nd term, as the economy was steadily improving? Her theory also cannot explain why adolescent mental health collapsed in similar ways around the same time in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, as Zach and I have shown: https://afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one… Nor can she explain why it also happened in the Nordic countries, which lack most of the social pathologies on Odgers’ list: https://afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-two… Nor why it also happened in much of Western Europe: https://afterbabel.com/p/international-crisis-europe… Nor why suicide rates for Gen Z girls (but not alway boys) are at record levels across the Anglosphere: https://afterbabel.com/p/anglo-teen-suicide… I just can’t see a causal path by which America’s school shootings, lockdown drills, inequality, or racism caused girls in Australia to suddenly start self-harming or dying by suicide at the same time as American girls. In short: There is a great deal of evidence for my claims that something terrible is happening to teens in many countries, and that a major contributing factor is the sudden international arrival of the phone-based childhood. I lay out this evidence––with hundreds of footnotes––in chapters 1, 5, 6, and 7 of The Anxious Generation. I have also laid it out in many posts at http://AfterBabel.com. All along, Zach and I have “shown our work” in public Google Docs and Substack posts, and we have invited others to critique it. Zach has made supplemental files for every chapter in The Anxious Generation, which give links to the datasets and data points that he used to create the graphs in the book. We invite you to check our work: https://anxiousgeneration.com/resources/supplements-for-each-chapter… Our work has benefited from cordial, normal, academic debates with the skeptics. We will continue to welcome their critiques. But please, everyone, stop saying that the evidence is “just correlational.”

     

     

  2. 7 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

    also isn’t your Easter on May 5 this year?

    Please sir. In old slavonic (the implication) it would be Пасха (Paskha). In greek Πάσχα (Pascha). The latins adopted the greek. All derived in one way or the other from the hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach) and the aramaic. If you are gonna try to dunk on calendars, at least maybe get your terminology aligned or it sounds like gibberish.  

  3. On 3/29/2024 at 11:56 AM, SydneyCarton said:

    I’m at the point of my life where my time is more valuable than the extra money it costs for me to have other people fix things. By the time I get supplies, watch the requisite videos, still manage to fuck up several times, something that takes someone else 30 minutes takes me 4 hours. And is probably half assed. Practice makes perfect but how many times will I need to learn now to replace a ceiling fan or a sink fixture in my life at this point? 2, maybe 3 more?
     

    There’s a baseline of knowledge and intuition and understanding handy people have acquired over a lifetime that I don’t have, and at this point it’s a conscious choice for me to not spending the time to acquire it. Maybe when I retire. But I somewhat view it as along to learning a language when you’re young versus old. 
     

    When I was a kid I built my own computers and messed with all that stuff. I understand that all it takes is motivation. 

    Trade "secrets" are a real thing. There is value in the lessons learned, the little tweaks and tricks that get a job done and done right. There is also a lot of very basic incompetence among some trades and some jobs if you want done right, you got to dig in. I also smell like power steering fluid right now. 

    • Haha 1
  4. 3 hours ago, HenryJames said:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

    Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

    Weird book review tbh.

  5. 34 minutes ago, dcbc said:

    Cross-posted from the shit I cooked lately thread (Easter edition).
     
    I saw an Instagram video where someone did this and decided it could not possibly be anything but delicious.  Gumbo Pot Pie.  I made a stock on Monday.  Last night, I made the pie crust and did an oven roux ahead of time.  Then, while transferring the roux from the cast iron pan to a mason jar, I knocked over the jar and spilled roux all over the counter, which sucked for two reasons---I lost my roux and what an awful mess.
     
    Got up this morning and started another oven roux (I'm convinced these have more positive contributions to the final product than the old stand-and-stir.  Did all my prep, and had the gumbo ready by 4 pm.  Ate some for dinner and put together the rice and gumbo mixture for the pie.  This is the biggest variable and I oped for more meat that liquid and tried to keep the rice in a good balance.  But it is more rice heavy than I'd have it in a bowl. 
     
    Anyway, I'll post the final picture when it's reheated, sliced and served tomorrow.
     

     
     
     
     

    [
    4c871f8d7331a88131f6168ca18ac6a8.jpg7d677046a2f415bfc40f163cdd6e1fff.jpgc9e76f4791cb0cdca87d7c3625d04285.jpg1c053bbcf715787f4082ba0979cd5e43.jpg

    Well that’s goddamned interesting. 

    • Like 1
  6. Made a big ass pot of lentils, onions, and rice and we have just a "bit" of leftovers. Savory, so thought it might fry up nice as a pancake. 

    Fried mujadra pancake with runny eggs. Put a little green salsa on top of the lentil cake before the egg went on. 

    IMG-3186.jpg 

    • Hook 'Em 5
    • Like 1
  7. 1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    Extremely enlightening.

    Yes, like watching Matt Miller at the podium showing us all how the US-led rules-based order works.

  8. 1 hour ago, statsman said:

    I don’t know who that is. 
     
    I was talking about the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, both believing they had some kind of genetic superiority. 

     

    Fun little game of guess who said it, a Nazi, an Imperial Japanese, or an Israeli.

    "We must create a situation whereby killing a [ethnicity] is like killing a rat, where [ethnicity] are dirt, and thereby showing that we and not they are the power to be reckoned with in [country]"

    "They aren’t human beings and not human animals, they’re subhuman and that’s how they should be treated."

    "Exterminating the roaches... exterminating the rats...Share this beauty."

    "We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."

    "Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live"

     

     

  9. On 3/27/2024 at 12:14 PM, statsman said:

    I would argue that whoever a society or people gets it into their heads that they are innately superior to another, really shitty things happen. 

    You mean, kinda like the Children of the Light?

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