Links to Consider, November 3

Rob Henderson on the friendship paradox; Dueling theories of rising teenage suicide; Ed West on national conservatism;

Rob Henderson writes,

Even though we have a pervasive tendency to hold self-serving views about ourselves, we believe our social lives are more impoverished than others.

This is not the paradox that he thinks it is. We need to differentiate between measures of our character and measures of outcomes. Holding self-serving views means that we think highly of our intelligence, morality, and so on. It also means that we have high estimates of the outcomes that others enjoy—their wealth, their sex lives, and so on—and we think that our own outcomes are less than what we merit. It is two sides of the same ego.

Zach Rausch writes with Jonathan Haidt,

Over the last century, global suicide rates have been in decline, especially among older adults and particularly among those living in non-western nations. But this broad historical trend masks a very different story that emerges when we focus on adolescent girls in many Western nations. In all five Anglosphere nations, Gen Z girls and young women had the highest rates of suicide of any recent generation. The same was not true of Gen Z boys and young men.  

…There was one seismic shift in how interpersonal relationships work that fits the timing well: the global and simultaneous migration of adolescent social life onto smartphones and social media platforms, which happened roughly between 2010 and 2015. In The Anxious Generation, Jon shows that this evolution fundamentally altered the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, shifting childhood from one that was (generally) in-person, embodied, synchronous, and play-based to one that was (generally) virtual, disembodied, largely asynchronous, and phone-based. Since the early 2010s, stable in-person communities and relationships have rapidly disintegrated, as transient networks of low-investment relationships took their place.

Peter Gray writes,

My conclusion—consistent with the conclusion of the great majority of behavioral scientists who have published research on this question—is that digital technology probably has some negative effects on young people’s wellbeing (and some positive effects, to be discussed in my next letter), but the negative effects are too small and inconsistent to explain the sharp decline in mental wellbeing over this period.

The research aimed at understanding the relation of teens’ uses of digital technology to their mental health is of three main types: cross-sectional correlational studies, longitudinal correlational studies, and random assignment experiments. I will take each in turn.

Ed West writes,

I also believe that states start to suffer unfixable problems once multiculturalism reaches a certain threshold; where the dominant group does not enjoy a supermajority, then voting tends to run along lines of identity, which makes politics less rational, more emotive, and sometimes more violent. It also brings with it all the passions and hatreds of the world, often encouraged by western thinkers. The alternative to nation-states is inevitably some form of empire, with restrictions on freedom of expression and law enforcement agencies forced to behave like colonial police forces.

This is a form of governance many of those in charge seem perfectly happy with, but what do the rest of us get out of it? I don’t want to live in an empire, I don’t want all the world’s disputes played out in my hometown every week, and I don’t want British people to feel afraid in their own country because of rage over a war on another continent. Something has to change.

The view that a state is either a nation-state or an empire is central to Yoram Hazony’s thinking.

substacks referenced above:

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Europe’s turn to the Right

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D6. Can Increased Use of Digital Technology Explain the Sharp Rise in Teen Suicides from 2008 to 2019?

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Suicide Rates Are up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls

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The Friendship Paradox and the Illusion of Loneliness