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Jon Haidt's avatar

Thank you David!

I'll respond by email with an invitation to read and critique chapters from The Anxious Generation, which i must turn in august 7, but can revise after that.

a few points briefly here:

on causality: i addressed a lot of this in my post about the critics,

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong

who focus only on the dose response model, and who think that a correlation of r = .15 is small, when in fact even if that was all there was, it could explain a big increase in depression in a population, e.g.,

https://chris-said.io/2022/05/10/social-media-and-teen-depression/

on social media being common before 2012: yes, but:

1) it was not very viral and was much less harmful before the intro of the like and retweet buttons, 2009.

2) before smartphones, kids could not be on it all day long; so that only starts around 2010.

3) instagram is uniquely harmful to girls, and that only gets popular 2012.

on suicide and boys: you are right that we have said little, bcause we were figuring it out. But now we have a chapter on boys in the book, and Zach has a series of posts on suicide that will begin soon; we'd love to get your comments on them.

more by email,

and thank you,

jon

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Rhymes With "Brass Seagull"'s avatar

Well-said overall as usual. Haidt's proposed drastic and likely very dangerous measures are at best a band-aid solution in search of a problem, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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