When Science is Seen as Sin (Nature's Review of The Anxious Generation)
Candice Odgers and Nature insinuate that Haidt is unethical and Odgers then implies that Haidt is harming children merely by proposing his social media theory.
In previous posts we saw that, in her review in Nature of Jon Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, Candice Odgers ignores, distorts, and invents facts and reality in order to portray Haidt as ignorant and incompetent.
Today we will look at insinuations by Odgers and by Nature editors that Haidt is unethical and is harming children.
This post is part of a series concerned with the review of Haidt’s book in Nature:
The intent of this series is not to defend Haidt — he is capable of doing so on his own. The intent is to show how some of the debate within the academia about his new book is severely flawed and is dominated by ideologies instead of criticism. That does not mean that there is no legitimate criticism of Haidt — I myself hope to have provided such criticism in the past and hope to provide more in the future.
Hysteria Insinuation by Nature Editors
The subtitle of the review is as follows:
The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
These are not the views declared by Odgers — she actually says there is no evidence to support Haidt (and preponderance of evidence against Haidt), and she does not explore the topic of ‘hysteria’ in her review (although she has portrayed concerns about tech as a 'panic’ in her other writings).
Subtitles are typically written by editors and readers are likely to view this particular subtitle as a message from the editors of Nature.
So what message is being sent?
The message is that Haidt is contributing to the spread of ‘hysteria’ and this in turn is distracting us from tackling the real causes and therefore harms children.
The message, however, is in the form of insinuation rather than direct accusation.
Insinuation has great advantages, as the editors do not have to explain what counts as ‘hysteria’ and how is Haidt contributing to it. The formulation has a typical ‘plausible deniability’ format (e.g. could instead of does distract ) so in case anyone objects the editors can always respond that they are not implying anything about Haidt at all.
And yet, of course, the message is clear to most readers of Nature: Haidt is impeding efforts to combat the real causes and is therefore inflicting harm to children.
Nature has certainly the right to accuse social psychologists such as Haidt of contributing to the harm of children.
The issue is should this be in the form of an insinuation instead of a direct and substantiated accusation?
And when such a grave indictment against a scholar appears in the form of an insinuation, what does it say about the basic tenets of Nature? Is it moving away from scientific foundations towards principles based on ideologies, at least within social sciences?
Profiteering Insinuation by Odgers
Odgers herself demonstrates proficiency in classical insinuation when she declares right at the beginning:
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.
In other words the very first assertion Odgers thinks must be communicated to the public is the insinuation that Haidt is financially and socially profiteering from exploiting fears that many parents are ‘primed’ to believe — primed perhaps by people like Haidt himself.
As usual the insinuation is vague enough to be deniable, but it is the language that gives it away: Odgers could have said simply that the book will be read by many but instead she chose to emphasize that it will sell many copies; she has used the term ‘primed’ to imply manipulation; and she has portrayed Haidt as telling a ‘scary story’ rather than presenting a theory.
She knows what she’s doing, we know what she’s doing, but she can always deny that she is insinuating anything.
Infliction of Harm by Scientific Ideas
An astonishing pronouncement in the pages of a scientific journal is the third accusation by Odgers, as seen in the following passage:
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.
The surprising part is not the accusation that Haidt’s theory is not supported by science, or even the fact that Odgers later equates Haidt to people who believed the Earth is flat.1
The alarming aspect of her statement is what she declares to be worse than a supposed lack of scientific evidence: the bold proposal that social media is to blame.
So the mere proposal that social media is to blame is in and of itself the real evil here that is truly harmful — the scientific evidence for such a proposal is of a secondary concern.
Yes, Odgers outright states that the mere ‘proposal that social media is to blame’ is on its own pernicious and she then implies that it outright harms children as it supposedly distracts us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.
One could object that nobody is forcing Odgers to be distracted from solving the ‘real’ causes of the current mental-health crisis. One could also ask just how is Odgers solving the problems that she later enumerated as the likely real causes: access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation.
Of course that would be missing the very point of insinuations: they are deliberately left so vague and ambiguous that they border on nonsense precisely because that helps to maximize the accusations implied by the insinuation.
Nature and Science
One might wonder if Odgers simply misspoke and did not really mean to condemn Haidt for merely proposing that social media is a major cause of the declines in adolescent mental health. This seems unlikely to me based on her other writings, but Odgers is of course free to respond to my skepticism by issuing a correction of her statement.
It seems incredible, however, that the editors of Nature would miss such an unscientific sentiment declared prominently right in the opening paragraph of an extremely high-profile review of what was clearly destined to be one of the most widely debated books about one of the most controversial topics of our time.
Perhaps the editors missed nothing but did not even think of asking Odgers if she really meant what she wrote. That would be understandable in publications representing fundamentalist doctrines of religious or political nature — but Nature is a scientific journal.
That again raises the question of where Nature stands within current disputes between science journals as primarily a free exchange of scientific ideas versus sciences journals as primarily tools subservient to various social ideologies.
As we can see, such ideologies may easily incorporate corporate agendas, such as the notion that merely proposing that the social media industry is fundamentally inimical to adolescent health amounts to committing a sin.
That we should question assumptions that we think are true carefully is a lesson from Haidt’s own work. Everyone used to ‘know’ that the world was flat.