Cowen, "Let me offer a representative counterexample which is a set whose members are some of the most exceptionally gifted young people in the whole world, who possess the extraordinarily rare mix of attributes that make them highly likely to successfully lead cutting edge projects to completion, as defined by me, since I personally selected them on that basis, and literally wrote a whole book on how to scout for elite talent."
Come on man, you've got to be kidding me with this.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make before. That is a crap counter example, one that he would never accept someone else presenting. What the hell is that?
I immediately thought: he's approaching this topic as though the potential "lost generation" consisted entirely of Westinghouse competition winners.
I would expect those kids to break away even further, now: the more the dumbing down of their peers, the greater the bifurcation, the "better" for them in the sense that they won't ever have to spend/waste any time in their company, isolated as they are on their respective screens ... The difference between the brainy science-focused kid, and the normal kid whose brain is made mush by leisure time eaten up online or equally by the screen fad in education (no book, no pen, no effort without the crutch of the "answer" essentially always being before your eyes a la the internet), not to mention the low IQ kids for whom the effect may be different still ... is now so great that it would no longer occur to anyone to say, as they used to, "it's good for you to go to regular school, because those are your peers, that's the world you'll have to live in, you will gain some understanding of others that way and perhaps a dose of humility".
I grant that that sentiment made a lot of excuses for the increasing failure through the 70s and 80s of public school to be a place worth spending 12 near-compulsory years. But the problem was not the kids but the way in which one was forced to spend one's time, most of it in a sort of "great divorce" from what was good and what was useful, indoors, under the florescent light, coming at e.g. Shakespeare as a total ignoramus, made even more so by being taught Macbeth as something-something "feminism" meaning you were actually made dumber by "reading" Macbeth at "school".
50 years ago, the really bright kids were sitting next to you in class because there was effectively nowhere else for them to be/no online alternative for them. "Homeschooled" was not a term in everyday usage.
And the difference between those mathletes and you was not so stark as to drive them absolutely mad perhaps. Bored, sure, advance a grade or two, yes. Maybe become the teacher's assistant in effect.
And it was in the condition of less-than-total inanity of the general population, that the kid geniuses took us to the moon, invented personal computing, and perfected advanced medical techniques.
Maybe, just maybe, T.C. should reflect that they *didn't* do all this entirely by themselves.
A young person doesn't even get to be in the running to be selected by Cowen without first having made it through the selection effect of being born with all this stuff and by emerging despite any potential downside as potential elite talents implies having precisely the kind of characteristics that make them resistant to them! Using them as an example of anything is completely perverse as it actually makes the entirely opposite case to the one he's proposing.
Imagine dumping a bunch of insecticide on a thousand acres full of millions of ant hills and finding the one immune mutant survivor colony and declaring, "See, I'm telling you, this insecticide, it's totally harmless to ants!"
Smart phones and social media are evil—a necessary evil. I was the last person to get a smartphone phone, and before that, even refused to text on a dumb phone, but it is very difficult to live in this world without a smartphone or texting. It is too awkward and inefficient.
I knew that being on Facebook and having a smartphone would cause me enormous distractions, so I quit Facebook before getting a smartphone phone.
My oldest child hates smartphones and the internet because they take away from me being with her.
For years after getting a smartphone, I kept all apps off my phone, but I now have the Substack app on my phone. Its little push notifications that vibrate my wrist and pocket are a great source of “distraction and connectedness.”
Over the past decade I have quit all social media, including Gmail and LinkedIn; I despise YouTube, and Google, and avoid them as much as possible. I am a “purist,” as much as I can be.
But as you know, I do Substack. In My Tribe and other Substacks like yours are huge “distractions.” I occasionally delete the Substack app, and free myself of them for a day or two, but chatting with other Substackers is too fun. I download it again. Posting comments is too fun. Reading your posts, too educational. I know I should not be starting my day with Substack. It’s sets poor tone for the day.
My kids will not be getting smartphones until they turn 18. They don’t attend and will never attend a public K-12 school as long as I’m alive. Public schools have many problems, cell phone and social media being two of many.
Laptops with internet are evil too. “Some people” wake up, sit down at the breakfast table with their bowl of oatmeal and silently read the news on their laptop rather than participate in breakfast table conversation. “They” also sneak off to the back room and quietly stream, rather than watch the family movie.
Once, one member of the family starts down this path, it pushes the others to do the same.
People want to connect either in person or online. If some family members are online, then the others in the room or house are alone—sort of abandoned.
What is the solution? Discipline. Strict rules of internet conduct implemented at the family level. I myself need to implement these rules for myself because I am this biggest abuser.
For public schools, the solution is to “get rid of public schools.”
For public policy, I have nothing to contribute other than “leave us alone.”
For my own family, I am working towards moving us more outside, to be more connected with our neighbors and community.
I’m an advocate for children going outside and playing. I want to live in a neighborhood where there is lots of outdoor play, and many in person book clubs.
I want In My Tribe to be in person in my neighborhood. We need more walk and talks.
I didn't have a smartphone until long after everyone else. I remember a particular moment from this period. My husband's extended family were always avid game players (especially bridge - my son was playing good bridge by about six). We were gathered together for a week. My mother-in-law had brought her Scrabble game as usual. Four or five of us started to play. Something seemed off. Usually I was the one doing handwork who had to be reminded it was her turn, but this time I seemed to be more on the ball. I worked out that while they were deigning to play Scrabble with me, they were all playing their customary Words With Friends with each other on their phones - and the IRL Scrabble game was definitely taking a back seat :-).
In truth there was much less conversation that year, overall - but fortunately everyone felt the loss, and thus was born a new etiquette around it.
Whether that kind of intention-to-be-present works if you never knew the "before" time, I don't know.
I hear you. I got sucked into to some Substack thing on Sunday night while playing the Minecraft board game with my three kids. They were happy just to have me play, but on their turn I had my head down into my phone. I need to kick the habit and be more present.
Maybe if it is simply too much to ask, that you should engage with the game as thoroughly as they do, you could keep a book open to dip into. I find a book much easier to resist in company - much harder to be absorbed in when people are nearby.
I agree that the real story here is about much larger social megatrends than smartphone usage of social media. I honestly think social media is in decline including among Gen Z…YouTube streaming is by far more prevalent among adolescents. The mass distraction of handheld video is the huge megatrend that damages childhood, social connection, ritual and bonding…
Good grief. Why is it not surprising Cowen would try to generalize from an extremely narrow group of young people who are involved with his Emergent Ventures program. Does he really not see the silliness of such a counter-argument?
Ban it in the schools completely. Florida (and maybe others) have already done this.
Parents can exert some control over their kids outside of school, but in school if their friends have phones they will all be around the phones all day.
I think Cowan is missing the point a bit. Sure, there are probably a percentage of people who are using social media as an internet communication protocol and being very productive. The other 95%+ are not, and are finding it damaging. Just like bloodletting as a medical treatment does actually help one or two diseases, but harms everything else.
That doesn’t mean I support regulation, but it does imply that parents should be very careful about what they let their kids use and when.
As far as I can tell most of the regulation proposed by Haidt is intended to help parents supervise children's social media access, such as requiring permission, age verification, and school use restrictions rather than attempts at blanket bans
The last time I had any regular contact with kids of middle and high school age was almost a decade ago. These were diligent, well-mannered kids at Highly-Ranked School District. They were uniformly sceptical of their iPad educations, this in its all-day, every-subject way having been introduced mostly after they were past elementary school. "The kids mostly use them to facetime all day", they said. Their assignments took little time to complete.
The other thing was that kids of almost any age were cleverer about technology than: their teachers, of course - but also the people the district was able to recruit to do IT.
The idea that kids' use could be controlled by their "inferiors" in this way, was ridiculous.
In fact, when against the wishes of many of the parents, a group of whom had put up signs and really campaigned against it in just the same way they would have campaigned *for* other things - the first cohort of first-graders were each given their own iPad to take back and forth to school, on which to do their work - there was a scandal when *the very first week* of school, found the first graders giggling at pornography. Despite the district's "filter" lol.
If the kids can no longer run end-around the teachers in this way - that's probably a bad sign generally.
I feel like Haidt is ignoring the fact that many parents _want_ their kids to use their phones, just so that they wouldn't bother them. Look at parents of kids under the age of 6 - plenty of them are happy to stuff a tablet in front of their toddler and leave them be. Even with the best regulations in the world I'd guess at least 80% of parents will just let their 11 year olds use Facebook.
Imagine this payoff vs baseline / probability table:
1. Good Regulation, +10, 0.0001%
2. No Regulation, -10, 39.9999%
3. Terrible Regulation, -100, 60%
Now imagine it's possible to use "marketing" to raise some probability by a third at the cost of the other. It's thus plausible to nudge things from a state of affairs in which scenario 2 is more likely than scenario 3, which is a net win, though still a negative outcome vs the current status quo as it continues the downward trend. Nothing at all can be done for scenario 1, which is utterly hopeless.
The big picture is that to argue for scenario 2 over 3 one ends up kind of pretending that scenario 1 doesn't exist (or is in the same category as very bad 3) or that the current trend really isn't bad at all, that is, not just better than 3 as a relative comparison, but in fact, positively good, an improvement in absolute terms.
Out of terror of scenario 3 I am grudgingly willing to go along with those who advocate for scenario 2 in this manner if those are the only cards to play, but I can't deny that this kind of advocacy has a one- ring feel to it and is profoundly intellectually and morally corrupting to those who forget the joke and actually come to embrace that whole mental framework.
I mean, sure, that is a very long version of what I mean, which is “it is wrong to say that social media isn’t generally bad for humans, with some upside and many downsides for most people, but that doesn’t mean it should be regulated because that will be worse.”
Of course Cowan tries to play that esoteric strategy so much that one can’t tell whether he is playing a strategy or really is just wrong, or maybe has been corrupted in fundamental ways. How do you tell when he is being genuine? It’s as bad as someone who just responds to every negative reaction to their behavior with “I was only joking”.
Sure, but then none of his contemporaries or coworkers do that. I know, I know them personally. There doesn’t seem to be extra pressure on Cowan that they don’t bear, at least not pressure that he hasn’t chosen himself. I think one can be honest and clear, and indeed should be rather than either attempting to outsmart strategically all of society, or worse merely claiming you were when people call you out for bad behavior.
I prefer honesty clarity too, but we can't always get what we want. Pressure is not the right way to put it, more like a trade off. It's the cost of keeping certain important options and opportunities and channels of influence open which he can exercise and they cannot. Elite academics in politically sensitive subjects who lived during the very bad times in the Soviet Union or China are perfectly familiar with this game and the cues that indicate playing it well has become an indispensable skill to cultivate.
To be frank and clear, my impression is that many of his coworkers have been quite naive and careless in this regard, benefiting as they have obliviously enjoying the last generation of a low-threat intellectual environment, mistaking lucky timing in an unsustainable dynamic for a stable and sustainable social equilibrium. Those threats have increased in severity and the situation will continue to deteriorate substantially just at the time these academics can most absorb the risks and enjoy personal and financial security at the likely second half of their professional careers, and the army of hypervigilant snipers can certainly tolerate a few loose ends that time itself with shuffle off the stage eventually. If these individuals are trying to judge the future and what dissidents will be forced to do by extrapolating from their own personal experiences at the end of particular kind of 'Dreamtime' then they are making a mistake.
Cowan isn’t young… you know that, right? He is at roughly the same stage of career as eg Caplan, and exactly the same as say Klein. Likewise Boudreaux, Roberts, Cochrane… unless Cowan is trying to leave GMU and go to Harvard or Stanford etc he has roughly the same position they do; it isn’t like he has a tenure review coming up.
I do get what you are saying, but there is some point where it becomes unclear whether one is trying to meet people in the middle and adjust a message to persuade the out group, or actually has become the out group and is trying to mislead you by pretending, or just playing both sides of the fence and claiming strategic thinking as they get caught changing uniforms. I am not saying Cowan is doing any of those, but I am saying it isn’t clear to me what he is doing and those seem to be possibilities. I think people should avoid acting in such a fashion as that question gets asked. This 5 dimensional chess nonsense is just that, and holding your tongue to get along is precisely why things got this bad in the first place (among other reasons of course, but it is a necessary condition.)
I have made it a point to see if any young (under 25) people in my gym do not look at their phones between doing sets. I haven’t found any. It makes me wonder how you could get any work done if you have a company with young people.
Steve Hardy - Where I worked we put out notice to our work groups (mostly younger) that personal cell phone use was restricted to urgent family issue, brief, etc. for exactly that reason - productivity impact. The groaning and carping surpassed what we’d anticipated, and stealth usage continued.
That is a fair point about the mess of the family, and how many kids are in single parent homes. My understanding though was that Haidt and company had controlled for things like family structure when they were studying the question. If they didn’t that is a huge gap indeed.
I'd defer to the good Doctor on this one. I'm not familiar enough with Haidt's research to opine. The only thing I'm fairly certain about is that any attempt to regulate social media is not very likely to achieve its beneficial aims and very likely to achieve unintended negative consequences.
Agreed. That seems to me to be the strongest argument to make. All the basic regulations on say pornography hasn’t kept kids away from it, so I see no reason to believe it would work for social media. More likely it would give regulators more leverage to censor and control what is on social media, or create monopolies on social media for the government to sell.
It seems like a uniquely good opportunity for not only the usual Baptists and Bootleggers, but also for teh government to do Big Brother-type stuff like we saw with the Twitter Files.
Aye. Disagreeing about puberty blockers on a site with the possibility of one minor reading it will be felony cyber bullying, and you will get prison time. Kind of like Canada, the UK or the EU today.
Sites must require age verification, is one modern. In the before times you had to package it in a way to make it unobtrusive if around children (brown paper) or not allow minors into “adult” stores. There are a number of rules for websites around porn, but they vary by state; federal rules seem limited mostly to misleading domain names etc.
None of that works, of course. The more serious bills like COPA etc (if I am getting the acronym right) basically caused problems for all sorts of people and all types of communication, so they kept getting overturned. It seems that any control of speech that keeps porn out of the hands of kids is sufficient to keep any speech from the hands of anyone. Which is about what I would expect, really. Once you give regulators the power to prevent something because something bad might happen they will come up with endless possible bad things to happen.
My personal experience as a parent is so different from what I read about other parents going through that I can only assume that something about my family is fundamentally different. But I cannot pinpoint exactly what it is.
I am happily married with 5 children. My oldest daughter is 24 and graduated from Emerson college in Boston three years ago. She works as the Marketing and Special Projects Director at our local Jewish Community Center. She uses social media every single day as a professional tool to help promote the programs she is working on. As far as personal complaints about it social media, mostly it's just that she is having a hard time using it to find a young Jewish gentleman she wants to go on more than one or two dates with.
My second daughter is graduating in a couple of weeks with her Master's Degree from the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts. If I am being honest about it she is the one I follow least closely because she lives on campus and has been working her tail off. But to a first approximation her biggest social media conflicts seem to involve her older sister
My third daughter is a Junior at Wellesley College and President of their Mock Trial team. She is a temperamentally aggressive borderline workaholic who is CONTANTLY locked in diplomatic combat, forming and dissolving alliances, political backstabbing, and jockeying for power all while getting ready to set everything aside to go face the Yale Mock Trial team at the regional finals. But this all takes place mostly over lunch meetings in the cafeteria and midnight text messages, not social media. She THRIVES on it, and it doesn't strike me as anything different from what an ambitious young woman would have experienced 20 years ago
My son hardly uses social media at all. It just doesn't have a lot of appeal for him, other than watching videos on you tube.
My last daughter is turning 14 in a couple weeks and is right in the "zone" for when young women seem to be having the most trouble. But she doesn't appear to spend ANYTHING like the amount of time on social media than most young women do. I see her in the evenings and mostly she sits with my wife in the living room eating her dinner on a tv tray and watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls, The West Wing, and Friends. I spoke to her about it while driving her to school a couple of days ago and she confirmed that she does watch videos on TikTok, and messages her friends using Snapchat, but really doesn't devote a heck of a lot of time to it and has never been bullied, cancelled, ostracized, or anything else negative
So pretty much the experience MY kids have had on social media has been moderate, innocuous, and not at all troublesome
Personally I stopped using Facebook back in 2015 as soon as Donald Trump entered the Presidential Primary race. I knew right away that he was going to be the next President, and the vitriol spouted by both his detractors and advocates completely turned me off
We are a little bit more religiously observant family than would be considered normal today in that my wife has always made an elaborate Sabbath meal for the family every Friday night, we do keep kosher, and we do attend religious services together on Saturday mornings. But we are not Orthodox, I do drive a car on the Sabbath, and we do not ban electronics on the Sabbath. My wife was a stay at home mom for most of the children's upbringing, but mostly because of the exorbitant cost of childcare for a large family and not for some deeply rooted "Conservative" mindset.
What's the minimum standard by which we judge whether someone turned out 'well', though? I wish Haidt pointed out to some specific measurements by which modern adults are worse off, other than pointing out that we have less billionaires under the age of 30 these days.
Thought I might comment here, since I have some experience in the "control group", and didn't have a phone until college.
1) What Kids Want Out of Phones
The primary things that internet-connected devices achieve for kids in school is privacy (or the appearance of it) and ease of coordination. To the extent that a technology encourages privacy and communication, it will be used. Phones, for instance, were extremely useful for texting at our high school. Then laptops became allowed. Since laptops could facilitate communications (either through Apple's text features, chat apps of choice, or simply having a running Google Doc in class) phone usage dropped tremendously. Phones were then only used for things secret enough that you couldn't risk people reading your laptop over your shoulder.
It's worth noting that widespread instantaneous communication and privacy are at polar ends of the spectrum. In a sense, kids want instantaneous communications with each other, or with select friends, and privacy from adults. This explains why phones are so prominent at schools: Laptops don't buy you privacy from the kids sitting behind you, and you can't just say something private aloud in a room full of 20+ people. For a parent, laptops will suffice. Tyler gets this, I think he's spoken about it at some point: "When you ask the kid, "How was your day" what are they supposed to say? 'Terrible, I want to cry?' They can't answer!" I sympathize with that tremendously. Teens (and to some extent even pre-teens) have very little free range, and I think while Haidt is right to point this out in the physical realm, Tyler isn't wrong for suggesting that kids will want some form of private communications, with all the goods and bads that come with that. (I'd imagine the gossip of teens and pre-teens really hasn't changed all that much, with intel leaks happening constantly.) It's the demand for privacy that drives the behavior. Moreover, the phones are often the best way of coordinating across distance. I was lucky enough to have friends right down the block from me. Without them, my high school experience would have sucked!
As someone in the control group, I can tell you that both instantaneous widespread communication and the appearance of secrecy are highly valued amongst teens and pre-teens. I was trying to schedule events over email, and it literally never worked because everyone else was working off of their phone and trying to read email chains was nightmarish (idk if modern email UI would change that.) Without a phone, it felt like I had a surface-level understanding of literally everyone around me, except my closest friend. Meanwhile everyone else not only had completely invisible conversations happening around me, they had ranked all of their friends into groupchats of different priority. It seems highly likely that I offended multiple people on separate occasions, by referring to things that were seemingly lighthearted from what I knew, but were in fact deeply impactful and painful topics whose full contents were only ever shared over text. On the flip side, it sucks to feel like you are just aced out of being around your friends, solely because you either aren't scheduled into things or because you're missing 20 inside jokes everyday. This seemed to hold at the highest tier of academic achievement in my neighborhood, which probably wasn't EV-tier but was full of teacher's pet straight-A students.
(Note: This fades away tremendously in a typical adult office, where the norm is "Communication with family members is assumed to be rare, important, and brief, and you make up any time past some amount. Step out if you must make a long call, or you need privacy." Kids do not have this option, because their communications are assumed to be (and usually are) unimportant and lengthy, and they cannot "make up the time".)
I wouldn't be surprised if phone usage is actually linked to increased physical activity and in-person socializing in school. Sports teams and friend groups maxxing their hangouts are doing it in school, on their phones. It's the laptop class that's studying together from home that isn't socializing enough!
There is also an entertainment factor, which isn't trivial: I played a lot of phone games on *other people's phones* because I was so desperate just to use one. That said, I did that during "dead time" where teachers weren't teaching, either before or after class. It's actually pretty hard to play a game during class on a phone (though not a laptop, see Chess.com or Discord's Catan.)
2) What Kids Want Out of Social Media
Absolutely no clue. Like, absolutely no clue.
Partially, this is too broad a category to even begin. SnapChat, the friend ranking app that was initially designed for instantly deleted nude photos, is clearly more attuned to privacy. I think it was used essentially as more personalized private messages but people also posted on their SnapChat stories. SnapChat induced a lot of anxiety for ranking friends. IG seemed to be a place for people who felt confident to market themselves to possible dates, and for those lacking confidence to market their art or tastes. Twitter was a place for people to post about their role in the community, usually for their clubs or sports team. Mixed in with all of these motives was somewhat conscious effort to be more like new celebrities on any given app. It's worth noting that by that point, nobody was even trying to post on YouTube, or be a YouTuber, because the effort was already too high. One guy went on to have a very successful career in photography and videography, and he ran all the school accounts. (He might be the closest thing I can think of to an EV winner, actually!)
The teen girl distinction is important, and Cowen agreed with this. I suspect Instagram and other video/photo-based apps for pre-teen and teen girls are measurably bad products, and Twitter/Facebook/chat apps come out a wash. I'd wager this is more true in high school than adulthood, and that in fact much of this debate is driven by adults with tons of time spent online with tremendous opportunity costs. Tweeting, doing the next homework problem... I knew how to do Algebra!
3) The Negative Knock-Ons
In general, the people I knew who were most online (not just with phones, but also laptops) were least sociable across all tiers of academic achievement. They saw friends less and were less easy to talk to than their peers in school. Tyler might not value this much, but it seems likely to be true.
The entertainment value of games seem quite high to me, for lots of reasons.
TikTok and YouTube Shorts didn't exist when i was in school, but SnapChat had a similar feature, and everyone regarded it as a time-suck of negative value. *This has gotten worse, and seems likely to keep getting worse*. TikTok is a total time-suck, although I have never had it and cannot comment on the entertainment value. YouTube Shorts should be regarded as a self-debasement of the highest order and a crime against humanity. The Shorts suck, aren't funny or informative the way YouTube videos have to be, and they still consume hours of time. This is the progression everyone should rightfully be worried about. If Haidt destroys the rule of law but in the process could get rid of YouTube Shorts, it might be worth it. When people fear AI, they fear adversarial AIs designing ever-more successful tricks to keep them watching shitty YouTube Shorts. YouTube just put a ton of effort into making the worst product ever, and people keep watching it despite hating themselves for it. AI is scary, because it will work for YouTube.
Cowen's citing the EV kids is obviously not really a great counter. The median kid spends a ton of time on their phone, and the median adult quite frankly does too. This time is generally not well spent. Cowen makes a bunch of points about the bundle improving, and both Cowen and Haidt note that the bundle might increase or decrease in quality in the future, so it's difficult to make promises about the future. However, the current bundle sucks astronomically more than it did even five years ago, and AI will likely work for YouTube, right?
4) What You Get Out of Not Having a Phone
You get wildly reduced potential social life with your school friends, in exchange for clarity of mind, increased study time, and more time spent with your friends at home if you have them. If I hadn't had friends at home, I'd probably have been miserable. If I'd have had a phone and only seen my friends as often as I did without it, I'd probably have been miserable. If I'd had a phone and YouTube Shorts had existed, I probably would have been miserable.
I am not miserable nowadays, but YouTube Shorts generally does make me miserable, and in fact finding ways to block or cripple it are one of the easiest ways to make me happy.
5) Conclusion
Overall, I think Tyler's defense of social media by the use of the EV-winners was odd, because you can slice the salami pretty thinly here and get EV winners working together on Twitter while parents have to help their daughters log into IG. Government intervention and lawsuits seem really unlikely, but I think social pressure alone could encourage better IG policies. Tyler's comments about AI seem more likely to apply to enterprising Chrome Extension builders than AI (someone will block Shorts and return YouTube to its glory days) but I buy the argument of some improved future defenses. I just don't buy the idea that the bundle will improve without some individual effort that leaves a ton of people behind... how many people have Brave Browser or AdBlock installed today? Not enough!
I delayed phones for as long as I could. Oddly, it was public school teachers who forced my hand. Teachers would provide URLs for them to visit in class. My kids had to do extra work at home on the computer to catch up. If not for that, they would have kept their flip phones until age 16.
Haidt seems to think that if kids are blocked from social media, then they'll engage in healthy behavior. I am skeptical that social media itself is the problem. I suspect that the problem is the constant distraction and lack of social engagement that comes from media of all kinds. Ban Instagram, then it could be YouTube, Hulu, Disney+, video games, etc, that diverts their attention.
It was interesting that he said that conservatives make better parents and that conservative/religious kids seem to be immune from the social media menace. He also points out that suicide jumps dramatically when school starts. So, perhaps social media isn't the root problem. I think he's whacking the wrong mole.
" the decline in two-parent families " << this is hugely due to new norm against calling single mothers engaging in casual sex "sluts". Shame works -- that's when you realize others know you're guilty of what you should be ashamed of doing. With less shame society gets more shameful acts.
Yes, there is no equal insult, nor shame, for the men, the slut-jerks. Like ... JFK, LBJ, MLK, Bill Clinton, Trump, Elon Musk, Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood ... so many rich, powerful, and popular men. All slut-jerks, who should be somewhat ashamed of their sexual behavior, which is such a bad example for society.
Increasing the number of 2 parent families would be the best improvement we can make.
Nobody should be ashamed, or shamed, because of "who they are" in terms of sex, race, nationality, religion -- but all should be judged by behavior. As individual moral agents, all who have been victims to some extent.
Haidt is most correct -- we need to severely restrict access to smart phones, and the gov't needs to make laws that make it tough to get around them. Phone-free schools. With less homework, and more recess and far more time spent outside and at play. The Zvi does a great job in reviewing the podcast.
My own screen time is mostly reading articles, & commenting; and playing games -- which costs time for making comments in the first hours of a post.
I think Arnold is pretty wise (WIS) as well as intelligent (INT), don't know why Zvi doesn't read here more -- maybe Arnold should try to get him on a talk?
(Arnold wrong about failing to support Trump as far less bad than Biden & Obama Dems. Trump is also wrong about low support for Ukraine, tho correct that a lot, maybe most, of the cash given in aid will be in corruption.)
There are already some laws restricting what kids under 18 can do online. I found some of them so annoying and often too difficult to comply with that I had to create new accounts for my kids where I lied about their ages. Watch what you ask for and certainly don't substitute government for parents. Getting government to solve social problems is what helped lead to the decline in 2-parent households in the first place.
Cowen, "Let me offer a representative counterexample which is a set whose members are some of the most exceptionally gifted young people in the whole world, who possess the extraordinarily rare mix of attributes that make them highly likely to successfully lead cutting edge projects to completion, as defined by me, since I personally selected them on that basis, and literally wrote a whole book on how to scout for elite talent."
Come on man, you've got to be kidding me with this.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make before. That is a crap counter example, one that he would never accept someone else presenting. What the hell is that?
I immediately thought: he's approaching this topic as though the potential "lost generation" consisted entirely of Westinghouse competition winners.
I would expect those kids to break away even further, now: the more the dumbing down of their peers, the greater the bifurcation, the "better" for them in the sense that they won't ever have to spend/waste any time in their company, isolated as they are on their respective screens ... The difference between the brainy science-focused kid, and the normal kid whose brain is made mush by leisure time eaten up online or equally by the screen fad in education (no book, no pen, no effort without the crutch of the "answer" essentially always being before your eyes a la the internet), not to mention the low IQ kids for whom the effect may be different still ... is now so great that it would no longer occur to anyone to say, as they used to, "it's good for you to go to regular school, because those are your peers, that's the world you'll have to live in, you will gain some understanding of others that way and perhaps a dose of humility".
I grant that that sentiment made a lot of excuses for the increasing failure through the 70s and 80s of public school to be a place worth spending 12 near-compulsory years. But the problem was not the kids but the way in which one was forced to spend one's time, most of it in a sort of "great divorce" from what was good and what was useful, indoors, under the florescent light, coming at e.g. Shakespeare as a total ignoramus, made even more so by being taught Macbeth as something-something "feminism" meaning you were actually made dumber by "reading" Macbeth at "school".
50 years ago, the really bright kids were sitting next to you in class because there was effectively nowhere else for them to be/no online alternative for them. "Homeschooled" was not a term in everyday usage.
And the difference between those mathletes and you was not so stark as to drive them absolutely mad perhaps. Bored, sure, advance a grade or two, yes. Maybe become the teacher's assistant in effect.
And it was in the condition of less-than-total inanity of the general population, that the kid geniuses took us to the moon, invented personal computing, and perfected advanced medical techniques.
Maybe, just maybe, T.C. should reflect that they *didn't* do all this entirely by themselves.
A young person doesn't even get to be in the running to be selected by Cowen without first having made it through the selection effect of being born with all this stuff and by emerging despite any potential downside as potential elite talents implies having precisely the kind of characteristics that make them resistant to them! Using them as an example of anything is completely perverse as it actually makes the entirely opposite case to the one he's proposing.
Imagine dumping a bunch of insecticide on a thousand acres full of millions of ant hills and finding the one immune mutant survivor colony and declaring, "See, I'm telling you, this insecticide, it's totally harmless to ants!"
Smart phones and social media are evil—a necessary evil. I was the last person to get a smartphone phone, and before that, even refused to text on a dumb phone, but it is very difficult to live in this world without a smartphone or texting. It is too awkward and inefficient.
I knew that being on Facebook and having a smartphone would cause me enormous distractions, so I quit Facebook before getting a smartphone phone.
My oldest child hates smartphones and the internet because they take away from me being with her.
For years after getting a smartphone, I kept all apps off my phone, but I now have the Substack app on my phone. Its little push notifications that vibrate my wrist and pocket are a great source of “distraction and connectedness.”
Over the past decade I have quit all social media, including Gmail and LinkedIn; I despise YouTube, and Google, and avoid them as much as possible. I am a “purist,” as much as I can be.
But as you know, I do Substack. In My Tribe and other Substacks like yours are huge “distractions.” I occasionally delete the Substack app, and free myself of them for a day or two, but chatting with other Substackers is too fun. I download it again. Posting comments is too fun. Reading your posts, too educational. I know I should not be starting my day with Substack. It’s sets poor tone for the day.
How should I start my day? https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/how-shall-i-start-my-day?r=nb3bl&utm_medium=ios
Not on Substack as I am doing right now.
My kids will not be getting smartphones until they turn 18. They don’t attend and will never attend a public K-12 school as long as I’m alive. Public schools have many problems, cell phone and social media being two of many.
Laptops with internet are evil too. “Some people” wake up, sit down at the breakfast table with their bowl of oatmeal and silently read the news on their laptop rather than participate in breakfast table conversation. “They” also sneak off to the back room and quietly stream, rather than watch the family movie.
Once, one member of the family starts down this path, it pushes the others to do the same.
People want to connect either in person or online. If some family members are online, then the others in the room or house are alone—sort of abandoned.
What is the solution? Discipline. Strict rules of internet conduct implemented at the family level. I myself need to implement these rules for myself because I am this biggest abuser.
For public schools, the solution is to “get rid of public schools.”
For public policy, I have nothing to contribute other than “leave us alone.”
For my own family, I am working towards moving us more outside, to be more connected with our neighbors and community.
I’m an advocate for children going outside and playing. I want to live in a neighborhood where there is lots of outdoor play, and many in person book clubs.
I want In My Tribe to be in person in my neighborhood. We need more walk and talks.
I didn't have a smartphone until long after everyone else. I remember a particular moment from this period. My husband's extended family were always avid game players (especially bridge - my son was playing good bridge by about six). We were gathered together for a week. My mother-in-law had brought her Scrabble game as usual. Four or five of us started to play. Something seemed off. Usually I was the one doing handwork who had to be reminded it was her turn, but this time I seemed to be more on the ball. I worked out that while they were deigning to play Scrabble with me, they were all playing their customary Words With Friends with each other on their phones - and the IRL Scrabble game was definitely taking a back seat :-).
In truth there was much less conversation that year, overall - but fortunately everyone felt the loss, and thus was born a new etiquette around it.
Whether that kind of intention-to-be-present works if you never knew the "before" time, I don't know.
I hear you. I got sucked into to some Substack thing on Sunday night while playing the Minecraft board game with my three kids. They were happy just to have me play, but on their turn I had my head down into my phone. I need to kick the habit and be more present.
Maybe if it is simply too much to ask, that you should engage with the game as thoroughly as they do, you could keep a book open to dip into. I find a book much easier to resist in company - much harder to be absorbed in when people are nearby.
Good advice. Will do.
I agree that the real story here is about much larger social megatrends than smartphone usage of social media. I honestly think social media is in decline including among Gen Z…YouTube streaming is by far more prevalent among adolescents. The mass distraction of handheld video is the huge megatrend that damages childhood, social connection, ritual and bonding…
Good grief. Why is it not surprising Cowen would try to generalize from an extremely narrow group of young people who are involved with his Emergent Ventures program. Does he really not see the silliness of such a counter-argument?
Ban it in the schools completely. Florida (and maybe others) have already done this.
Parents can exert some control over their kids outside of school, but in school if their friends have phones they will all be around the phones all day.
Tyler just keeps saying that AI will fix everything. Can it really fix everything?
Sure, if it kills us all or brings upon a new utopia.
I think Cowan is missing the point a bit. Sure, there are probably a percentage of people who are using social media as an internet communication protocol and being very productive. The other 95%+ are not, and are finding it damaging. Just like bloodletting as a medical treatment does actually help one or two diseases, but harms everything else.
That doesn’t mean I support regulation, but it does imply that parents should be very careful about what they let their kids use and when.
As far as I can tell most of the regulation proposed by Haidt is intended to help parents supervise children's social media access, such as requiring permission, age verification, and school use restrictions rather than attempts at blanket bans
The last time I had any regular contact with kids of middle and high school age was almost a decade ago. These were diligent, well-mannered kids at Highly-Ranked School District. They were uniformly sceptical of their iPad educations, this in its all-day, every-subject way having been introduced mostly after they were past elementary school. "The kids mostly use them to facetime all day", they said. Their assignments took little time to complete.
The other thing was that kids of almost any age were cleverer about technology than: their teachers, of course - but also the people the district was able to recruit to do IT.
The idea that kids' use could be controlled by their "inferiors" in this way, was ridiculous.
In fact, when against the wishes of many of the parents, a group of whom had put up signs and really campaigned against it in just the same way they would have campaigned *for* other things - the first cohort of first-graders were each given their own iPad to take back and forth to school, on which to do their work - there was a scandal when *the very first week* of school, found the first graders giggling at pornography. Despite the district's "filter" lol.
If the kids can no longer run end-around the teachers in this way - that's probably a bad sign generally.
I feel like Haidt is ignoring the fact that many parents _want_ their kids to use their phones, just so that they wouldn't bother them. Look at parents of kids under the age of 6 - plenty of them are happy to stuff a tablet in front of their toddler and leave them be. Even with the best regulations in the world I'd guess at least 80% of parents will just let their 11 year olds use Facebook.
I don’t think those work well, and don’t think it is a good precedent to start, is all.
Imagine this payoff vs baseline / probability table:
1. Good Regulation, +10, 0.0001%
2. No Regulation, -10, 39.9999%
3. Terrible Regulation, -100, 60%
Now imagine it's possible to use "marketing" to raise some probability by a third at the cost of the other. It's thus plausible to nudge things from a state of affairs in which scenario 2 is more likely than scenario 3, which is a net win, though still a negative outcome vs the current status quo as it continues the downward trend. Nothing at all can be done for scenario 1, which is utterly hopeless.
The big picture is that to argue for scenario 2 over 3 one ends up kind of pretending that scenario 1 doesn't exist (or is in the same category as very bad 3) or that the current trend really isn't bad at all, that is, not just better than 3 as a relative comparison, but in fact, positively good, an improvement in absolute terms.
Out of terror of scenario 3 I am grudgingly willing to go along with those who advocate for scenario 2 in this manner if those are the only cards to play, but I can't deny that this kind of advocacy has a one- ring feel to it and is profoundly intellectually and morally corrupting to those who forget the joke and actually come to embrace that whole mental framework.
I mean, sure, that is a very long version of what I mean, which is “it is wrong to say that social media isn’t generally bad for humans, with some upside and many downsides for most people, but that doesn’t mean it should be regulated because that will be worse.”
Of course Cowan tries to play that esoteric strategy so much that one can’t tell whether he is playing a strategy or really is just wrong, or maybe has been corrupted in fundamental ways. How do you tell when he is being genuine? It’s as bad as someone who just responds to every negative reaction to their behavior with “I was only joking”.
If I had to blog under my real life identity I'd do it just like he does. C'est la guerre.
Sure, but then none of his contemporaries or coworkers do that. I know, I know them personally. There doesn’t seem to be extra pressure on Cowan that they don’t bear, at least not pressure that he hasn’t chosen himself. I think one can be honest and clear, and indeed should be rather than either attempting to outsmart strategically all of society, or worse merely claiming you were when people call you out for bad behavior.
I prefer honesty clarity too, but we can't always get what we want. Pressure is not the right way to put it, more like a trade off. It's the cost of keeping certain important options and opportunities and channels of influence open which he can exercise and they cannot. Elite academics in politically sensitive subjects who lived during the very bad times in the Soviet Union or China are perfectly familiar with this game and the cues that indicate playing it well has become an indispensable skill to cultivate.
To be frank and clear, my impression is that many of his coworkers have been quite naive and careless in this regard, benefiting as they have obliviously enjoying the last generation of a low-threat intellectual environment, mistaking lucky timing in an unsustainable dynamic for a stable and sustainable social equilibrium. Those threats have increased in severity and the situation will continue to deteriorate substantially just at the time these academics can most absorb the risks and enjoy personal and financial security at the likely second half of their professional careers, and the army of hypervigilant snipers can certainly tolerate a few loose ends that time itself with shuffle off the stage eventually. If these individuals are trying to judge the future and what dissidents will be forced to do by extrapolating from their own personal experiences at the end of particular kind of 'Dreamtime' then they are making a mistake.
Cowan isn’t young… you know that, right? He is at roughly the same stage of career as eg Caplan, and exactly the same as say Klein. Likewise Boudreaux, Roberts, Cochrane… unless Cowan is trying to leave GMU and go to Harvard or Stanford etc he has roughly the same position they do; it isn’t like he has a tenure review coming up.
I do get what you are saying, but there is some point where it becomes unclear whether one is trying to meet people in the middle and adjust a message to persuade the out group, or actually has become the out group and is trying to mislead you by pretending, or just playing both sides of the fence and claiming strategic thinking as they get caught changing uniforms. I am not saying Cowan is doing any of those, but I am saying it isn’t clear to me what he is doing and those seem to be possibilities. I think people should avoid acting in such a fashion as that question gets asked. This 5 dimensional chess nonsense is just that, and holding your tongue to get along is precisely why things got this bad in the first place (among other reasons of course, but it is a necessary condition.)
I have made it a point to see if any young (under 25) people in my gym do not look at their phones between doing sets. I haven’t found any. It makes me wonder how you could get any work done if you have a company with young people.
Steve Hardy - Where I worked we put out notice to our work groups (mostly younger) that personal cell phone use was restricted to urgent family issue, brief, etc. for exactly that reason - productivity impact. The groaning and carping surpassed what we’d anticipated, and stealth usage continued.
Rob Henderson said almost exactly the same thing about social media and parenting in an interview he excerpted on his substack today: https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/triggernometry-spectator-presidential?selection=7d5d82d5-d397-4ff2-be0f-d0b46de34721&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
That is a fair point about the mess of the family, and how many kids are in single parent homes. My understanding though was that Haidt and company had controlled for things like family structure when they were studying the question. If they didn’t that is a huge gap indeed.
I'd defer to the good Doctor on this one. I'm not familiar enough with Haidt's research to opine. The only thing I'm fairly certain about is that any attempt to regulate social media is not very likely to achieve its beneficial aims and very likely to achieve unintended negative consequences.
Agreed. That seems to me to be the strongest argument to make. All the basic regulations on say pornography hasn’t kept kids away from it, so I see no reason to believe it would work for social media. More likely it would give regulators more leverage to censor and control what is on social media, or create monopolies on social media for the government to sell.
It seems like a uniquely good opportunity for not only the usual Baptists and Bootleggers, but also for teh government to do Big Brother-type stuff like we saw with the Twitter Files.
Aye. Disagreeing about puberty blockers on a site with the possibility of one minor reading it will be felony cyber bullying, and you will get prison time. Kind of like Canada, the UK or the EU today.
What are the regulations on pornography?
Sites must require age verification, is one modern. In the before times you had to package it in a way to make it unobtrusive if around children (brown paper) or not allow minors into “adult” stores. There are a number of rules for websites around porn, but they vary by state; federal rules seem limited mostly to misleading domain names etc.
None of that works, of course. The more serious bills like COPA etc (if I am getting the acronym right) basically caused problems for all sorts of people and all types of communication, so they kept getting overturned. It seems that any control of speech that keeps porn out of the hands of kids is sufficient to keep any speech from the hands of anyone. Which is about what I would expect, really. Once you give regulators the power to prevent something because something bad might happen they will come up with endless possible bad things to happen.
Well, at least they can feel they’ve done their best lol. Even if it perhaps only raises further question.
My personal experience as a parent is so different from what I read about other parents going through that I can only assume that something about my family is fundamentally different. But I cannot pinpoint exactly what it is.
I am happily married with 5 children. My oldest daughter is 24 and graduated from Emerson college in Boston three years ago. She works as the Marketing and Special Projects Director at our local Jewish Community Center. She uses social media every single day as a professional tool to help promote the programs she is working on. As far as personal complaints about it social media, mostly it's just that she is having a hard time using it to find a young Jewish gentleman she wants to go on more than one or two dates with.
My second daughter is graduating in a couple of weeks with her Master's Degree from the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts. If I am being honest about it she is the one I follow least closely because she lives on campus and has been working her tail off. But to a first approximation her biggest social media conflicts seem to involve her older sister
My third daughter is a Junior at Wellesley College and President of their Mock Trial team. She is a temperamentally aggressive borderline workaholic who is CONTANTLY locked in diplomatic combat, forming and dissolving alliances, political backstabbing, and jockeying for power all while getting ready to set everything aside to go face the Yale Mock Trial team at the regional finals. But this all takes place mostly over lunch meetings in the cafeteria and midnight text messages, not social media. She THRIVES on it, and it doesn't strike me as anything different from what an ambitious young woman would have experienced 20 years ago
My son hardly uses social media at all. It just doesn't have a lot of appeal for him, other than watching videos on you tube.
My last daughter is turning 14 in a couple weeks and is right in the "zone" for when young women seem to be having the most trouble. But she doesn't appear to spend ANYTHING like the amount of time on social media than most young women do. I see her in the evenings and mostly she sits with my wife in the living room eating her dinner on a tv tray and watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls, The West Wing, and Friends. I spoke to her about it while driving her to school a couple of days ago and she confirmed that she does watch videos on TikTok, and messages her friends using Snapchat, but really doesn't devote a heck of a lot of time to it and has never been bullied, cancelled, ostracized, or anything else negative
So pretty much the experience MY kids have had on social media has been moderate, innocuous, and not at all troublesome
Personally I stopped using Facebook back in 2015 as soon as Donald Trump entered the Presidential Primary race. I knew right away that he was going to be the next President, and the vitriol spouted by both his detractors and advocates completely turned me off
We are a little bit more religiously observant family than would be considered normal today in that my wife has always made an elaborate Sabbath meal for the family every Friday night, we do keep kosher, and we do attend religious services together on Saturday mornings. But we are not Orthodox, I do drive a car on the Sabbath, and we do not ban electronics on the Sabbath. My wife was a stay at home mom for most of the children's upbringing, but mostly because of the exorbitant cost of childcare for a large family and not for some deeply rooted "Conservative" mindset.
> They turned out well.
What's the minimum standard by which we judge whether someone turned out 'well', though? I wish Haidt pointed out to some specific measurements by which modern adults are worse off, other than pointing out that we have less billionaires under the age of 30 these days.
Thought I might comment here, since I have some experience in the "control group", and didn't have a phone until college.
1) What Kids Want Out of Phones
The primary things that internet-connected devices achieve for kids in school is privacy (or the appearance of it) and ease of coordination. To the extent that a technology encourages privacy and communication, it will be used. Phones, for instance, were extremely useful for texting at our high school. Then laptops became allowed. Since laptops could facilitate communications (either through Apple's text features, chat apps of choice, or simply having a running Google Doc in class) phone usage dropped tremendously. Phones were then only used for things secret enough that you couldn't risk people reading your laptop over your shoulder.
It's worth noting that widespread instantaneous communication and privacy are at polar ends of the spectrum. In a sense, kids want instantaneous communications with each other, or with select friends, and privacy from adults. This explains why phones are so prominent at schools: Laptops don't buy you privacy from the kids sitting behind you, and you can't just say something private aloud in a room full of 20+ people. For a parent, laptops will suffice. Tyler gets this, I think he's spoken about it at some point: "When you ask the kid, "How was your day" what are they supposed to say? 'Terrible, I want to cry?' They can't answer!" I sympathize with that tremendously. Teens (and to some extent even pre-teens) have very little free range, and I think while Haidt is right to point this out in the physical realm, Tyler isn't wrong for suggesting that kids will want some form of private communications, with all the goods and bads that come with that. (I'd imagine the gossip of teens and pre-teens really hasn't changed all that much, with intel leaks happening constantly.) It's the demand for privacy that drives the behavior. Moreover, the phones are often the best way of coordinating across distance. I was lucky enough to have friends right down the block from me. Without them, my high school experience would have sucked!
As someone in the control group, I can tell you that both instantaneous widespread communication and the appearance of secrecy are highly valued amongst teens and pre-teens. I was trying to schedule events over email, and it literally never worked because everyone else was working off of their phone and trying to read email chains was nightmarish (idk if modern email UI would change that.) Without a phone, it felt like I had a surface-level understanding of literally everyone around me, except my closest friend. Meanwhile everyone else not only had completely invisible conversations happening around me, they had ranked all of their friends into groupchats of different priority. It seems highly likely that I offended multiple people on separate occasions, by referring to things that were seemingly lighthearted from what I knew, but were in fact deeply impactful and painful topics whose full contents were only ever shared over text. On the flip side, it sucks to feel like you are just aced out of being around your friends, solely because you either aren't scheduled into things or because you're missing 20 inside jokes everyday. This seemed to hold at the highest tier of academic achievement in my neighborhood, which probably wasn't EV-tier but was full of teacher's pet straight-A students.
(Note: This fades away tremendously in a typical adult office, where the norm is "Communication with family members is assumed to be rare, important, and brief, and you make up any time past some amount. Step out if you must make a long call, or you need privacy." Kids do not have this option, because their communications are assumed to be (and usually are) unimportant and lengthy, and they cannot "make up the time".)
I wouldn't be surprised if phone usage is actually linked to increased physical activity and in-person socializing in school. Sports teams and friend groups maxxing their hangouts are doing it in school, on their phones. It's the laptop class that's studying together from home that isn't socializing enough!
There is also an entertainment factor, which isn't trivial: I played a lot of phone games on *other people's phones* because I was so desperate just to use one. That said, I did that during "dead time" where teachers weren't teaching, either before or after class. It's actually pretty hard to play a game during class on a phone (though not a laptop, see Chess.com or Discord's Catan.)
2) What Kids Want Out of Social Media
Absolutely no clue. Like, absolutely no clue.
Partially, this is too broad a category to even begin. SnapChat, the friend ranking app that was initially designed for instantly deleted nude photos, is clearly more attuned to privacy. I think it was used essentially as more personalized private messages but people also posted on their SnapChat stories. SnapChat induced a lot of anxiety for ranking friends. IG seemed to be a place for people who felt confident to market themselves to possible dates, and for those lacking confidence to market their art or tastes. Twitter was a place for people to post about their role in the community, usually for their clubs or sports team. Mixed in with all of these motives was somewhat conscious effort to be more like new celebrities on any given app. It's worth noting that by that point, nobody was even trying to post on YouTube, or be a YouTuber, because the effort was already too high. One guy went on to have a very successful career in photography and videography, and he ran all the school accounts. (He might be the closest thing I can think of to an EV winner, actually!)
The teen girl distinction is important, and Cowen agreed with this. I suspect Instagram and other video/photo-based apps for pre-teen and teen girls are measurably bad products, and Twitter/Facebook/chat apps come out a wash. I'd wager this is more true in high school than adulthood, and that in fact much of this debate is driven by adults with tons of time spent online with tremendous opportunity costs. Tweeting, doing the next homework problem... I knew how to do Algebra!
3) The Negative Knock-Ons
In general, the people I knew who were most online (not just with phones, but also laptops) were least sociable across all tiers of academic achievement. They saw friends less and were less easy to talk to than their peers in school. Tyler might not value this much, but it seems likely to be true.
The entertainment value of games seem quite high to me, for lots of reasons.
TikTok and YouTube Shorts didn't exist when i was in school, but SnapChat had a similar feature, and everyone regarded it as a time-suck of negative value. *This has gotten worse, and seems likely to keep getting worse*. TikTok is a total time-suck, although I have never had it and cannot comment on the entertainment value. YouTube Shorts should be regarded as a self-debasement of the highest order and a crime against humanity. The Shorts suck, aren't funny or informative the way YouTube videos have to be, and they still consume hours of time. This is the progression everyone should rightfully be worried about. If Haidt destroys the rule of law but in the process could get rid of YouTube Shorts, it might be worth it. When people fear AI, they fear adversarial AIs designing ever-more successful tricks to keep them watching shitty YouTube Shorts. YouTube just put a ton of effort into making the worst product ever, and people keep watching it despite hating themselves for it. AI is scary, because it will work for YouTube.
Cowen's citing the EV kids is obviously not really a great counter. The median kid spends a ton of time on their phone, and the median adult quite frankly does too. This time is generally not well spent. Cowen makes a bunch of points about the bundle improving, and both Cowen and Haidt note that the bundle might increase or decrease in quality in the future, so it's difficult to make promises about the future. However, the current bundle sucks astronomically more than it did even five years ago, and AI will likely work for YouTube, right?
4) What You Get Out of Not Having a Phone
You get wildly reduced potential social life with your school friends, in exchange for clarity of mind, increased study time, and more time spent with your friends at home if you have them. If I hadn't had friends at home, I'd probably have been miserable. If I'd have had a phone and only seen my friends as often as I did without it, I'd probably have been miserable. If I'd had a phone and YouTube Shorts had existed, I probably would have been miserable.
I am not miserable nowadays, but YouTube Shorts generally does make me miserable, and in fact finding ways to block or cripple it are one of the easiest ways to make me happy.
5) Conclusion
Overall, I think Tyler's defense of social media by the use of the EV-winners was odd, because you can slice the salami pretty thinly here and get EV winners working together on Twitter while parents have to help their daughters log into IG. Government intervention and lawsuits seem really unlikely, but I think social pressure alone could encourage better IG policies. Tyler's comments about AI seem more likely to apply to enterprising Chrome Extension builders than AI (someone will block Shorts and return YouTube to its glory days) but I buy the argument of some improved future defenses. I just don't buy the idea that the bundle will improve without some individual effort that leaves a ton of people behind... how many people have Brave Browser or AdBlock installed today? Not enough!
I delayed phones for as long as I could. Oddly, it was public school teachers who forced my hand. Teachers would provide URLs for them to visit in class. My kids had to do extra work at home on the computer to catch up. If not for that, they would have kept their flip phones until age 16.
Haidt seems to think that if kids are blocked from social media, then they'll engage in healthy behavior. I am skeptical that social media itself is the problem. I suspect that the problem is the constant distraction and lack of social engagement that comes from media of all kinds. Ban Instagram, then it could be YouTube, Hulu, Disney+, video games, etc, that diverts their attention.
It was interesting that he said that conservatives make better parents and that conservative/religious kids seem to be immune from the social media menace. He also points out that suicide jumps dramatically when school starts. So, perhaps social media isn't the root problem. I think he's whacking the wrong mole.
" the decline in two-parent families " << this is hugely due to new norm against calling single mothers engaging in casual sex "sluts". Shame works -- that's when you realize others know you're guilty of what you should be ashamed of doing. With less shame society gets more shameful acts.
Yes, there is no equal insult, nor shame, for the men, the slut-jerks. Like ... JFK, LBJ, MLK, Bill Clinton, Trump, Elon Musk, Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood ... so many rich, powerful, and popular men. All slut-jerks, who should be somewhat ashamed of their sexual behavior, which is such a bad example for society.
Increasing the number of 2 parent families would be the best improvement we can make.
Nobody should be ashamed, or shamed, because of "who they are" in terms of sex, race, nationality, religion -- but all should be judged by behavior. As individual moral agents, all who have been victims to some extent.
Haidt is most correct -- we need to severely restrict access to smart phones, and the gov't needs to make laws that make it tough to get around them. Phone-free schools. With less homework, and more recess and far more time spent outside and at play. The Zvi does a great job in reviewing the podcast.
My own screen time is mostly reading articles, & commenting; and playing games -- which costs time for making comments in the first hours of a post.
I think Arnold is pretty wise (WIS) as well as intelligent (INT), don't know why Zvi doesn't read here more -- maybe Arnold should try to get him on a talk?
(Arnold wrong about failing to support Trump as far less bad than Biden & Obama Dems. Trump is also wrong about low support for Ukraine, tho correct that a lot, maybe most, of the cash given in aid will be in corruption.)
There are already some laws restricting what kids under 18 can do online. I found some of them so annoying and often too difficult to comply with that I had to create new accounts for my kids where I lied about their ages. Watch what you ask for and certainly don't substitute government for parents. Getting government to solve social problems is what helped lead to the decline in 2-parent households in the first place.
At least we could get them out of schools.