Criticism Is A Double-Edged Sword
The purpose of this Substack newsletter was always criticism -- not the defense of tech. This is why its focus may shift for a while away from 'enemies' of tech to 'defenders' of tech.
As the number of subscribers to this newsletter has grown steadily over its first year of existence, most of its current readers may not be familiar with its origins and intents.
The Purpose of The Shores of Academia on Substack
At the start of moving The Shores of Academia to Substack, I announced (see Welcome to The Shores of Academia):
The Shores of Academia will present analyses and commentary on issues in social sciences and education that are seldom if ever addressed elsewhere.
The focus in the near future will be the troubling rise of adolescent suicide and related matters. Many of my posts will be critiques of pertinent research and theories.
I further specified:
When Jean Twenge, later joined by Jonathan Haidt, started to argue that the main culprits behind declines in the mental health of adolescents are smartphones and social media, it induced considerable opposition and criticism. I myself contributed -- see Blinded by Gender, The Crime of Parsimony, and The Perils of Improper Terminology -- and I will continue to critique their work.
Some of the responses to Twenge and Haidt from their colleagues, however, have also been severely flawed, especially when dealing with statistics. This is unsurprising given that statistics are not only poorly understood within social sciences, but also greatly misunderstood by some of those in psychology who think they do understand statistics.
For this reason I may occasionally end up both criticizing and defending Twenge & Haidt.
Furthermore, sections titled Junk Science, A Monstrosity of Bad Science, The Monstrosity Project, Pseudoscience with a Postmodern Twist, and The Integrity of Scientific Institutions in that first post indicated that I always planned to expand the scope of my criticism far beyond issues specific to the rise of youth suicide.
Unfortunately, I was able to find enough time last year to only critique Haidt and some of the studies and arguments that he relied upon, as I write all my Substack articles entirely in my spare time. With such time being limited, Haidt's work was a priority as he was writing a book that I hoped could be influenced to the better by my criticism.
Some readers may have therefore been under the impression that my purpose here is to be a tech defender -- but that was never so. I am a critic, in particular a science critic.
In science, especially social sciences, the question is often not so much who is right and who is wrong; the issue is the degree to which some theories are both right and wrong.
To better understand this, consider that since depression among girls has increased by roughly 150%, even if social media are responsible for only one fifth of this growth, that would still mean responsibility for an increase by 30 percent. Haidt can be simultaneously wrong about social media being the prime culprit and yet right about social media inflicting a terrible harm on girls.
Even if my theory that childhood trauma is the main culprit behind the adolescent suicide doubling is correct, that can be easily compatible with smartphones proliferation being responsible for one fifth of those increases (a 20% rise for adolescents, a 40% rise for tween girls). So I may be 'right' and Twenge may be 'wrong' and yet smartphones may be exacting a terrifying toll on girls and boys.
Critiquing Tech Defenders
I hoped that by the end of the last year I will be able to launch the revision and expansion of my series on youth suicide rise that I started back in November 2019 -- so it would be roughly on its 5th anniversary.
Unfortunately, late last year was also when the National Academies released its 'consensus study' Social Media and Adolescent Health that contained severe misinformation, egregious fabrications, and an absurdly massive amounts of censorship -- all in the service of defending social media corporations.
The abuse of science and the distortion of truth in this large report is so ubiquitous that I'm still not fully done with its critique.
Now that Haidt's book was published, many of its loudest critics are precisely those who misinterpret statistics and misrepresent evidence the most -- and so some of them may also 'earn' my attention soon.
This does not mean my views changed. My criticism of Haidt still stands. I am also still an adamant opponent of mandatory age verification, although I do not think this is the right place to persuade others toward my political convictions (for those interested, my views are close to those of Haidt’s friend Lukianoff in My First Amendment concerns with ‘The Anxious Generation’).
It was always my intent to critique both sides of the debate — and to eventually focus on those who violate crucial principles of scientific discourse and thus endanger the integrity of science itself. If such fiends are to be found more on one side of the dispute, that is where my criticism will start to strike more often regardless of which side of the issue is closer to my heart.
Criticism Is A Double-Edged Sword
True criticism is in the service of truth, not ideology. If you cheered when the sword of criticism sliced through the ‘enemies’ of tech at one moment, do not be surprised if it will cut open ‘defenders’ of tech the next moment. Criticism is a double-edged sword and truth often lies wounded somewhere in the middle of the battlefield, awaiting rescue.
Agreed in upholding searching for the "wounded truth." Now, what is the basis for your numbers (or speculations?) holding social media responsible for one-fifth of the 150% increase, or 30% of the growth, in girls’ depression? Regression analyses of the few multi-factorial surveys/studies consistently find screen time’s association with girls’ depression is more like 1% to 2% (R=.122, R-squared=0.015, ABES). (You know this, but for readers who don’t, the R-value is simply a factor’s raw correlation, while the R-squared-value determines the factor’s explanatory and causal potential.)
Screen time, explaining just 1.5% of girls’ (and 1.1% of ‘tween girls’) depression in 2021 – after girls’ depression increased – could not possibly explain any significant proportion of the 2011-21 increase. It is highly unlikely from the evidence we have that “social media” is “inflicting terrible harm on teen girls.”
You are correct that childhood trauma is the major known associate. The ABES’s biggest associate with teen girls’ depression is parental abuse (R=.437, R-squared=.190), 13 times larger than screen time’s. Adding a few other significant factors boosts the multi-factor R-squared to around 0.25, which means we don’t know what causes 75% of teen depression.
More interesting is evidence of reverse association: troubled teens go online more, where some find personal contacts, groups, and services that help deter them from overt self-destructive acts. 65% of the girls most abused by parents/adults use screens 5+ hours a day, compared to just 46% of non-abused girls, and, of the 1,067 girls reporting both parental abuse and sadness, 14% of those with little/no screen time self-harmed and 41% attempted suicide, compared to 7% and 29%, respectively, of girls with 5+ hours/day of screen time.
Teens, like adults, experience both benefits and stresses accompanying online school, work, friends, family, news, etc., while those not online, or during vacations from screens, may report less stress and depression but are more isolated from personal connections that can "help them get through tough times." Pew and CDC find solid evidence for this.
Bluntly, those who blame social media decree, in effect, that no teens have any legitimate reason to be unhappy beyond being online too much, so unhappy teens (particularly girls) are just incompetent, fragile, mentally-disturbed victims of their own screen “addictions.” That ignores both complex survey evidence and the empirical fact that teen girls are vastly less self-destructive (girls age 12-17, 713 suicide and overdose deaths in 2022) than teen boys (1,434), their mothers (women age 42-47, 5,083), and fathers (men age 42-47, 13,864). Adults should be learning from girls’ coping strategies, not interfering with them.
As long as we nitpick incomplete information while letting the Big Interests dictate that huge issues like parental abuses/addictions and survey complexities are off the table, we will not be able to produce the objective, comprehensive statistical analyses on teen and adult depression and suicide we need.
Bravo, David. Your work is very inspiring. Challenging us all.