Inquisitive Bird on Assimilation; Christopher J. Ferguson on correlations with mental health; David A. Shaywitz on Super Agers; Steve Stewart-Williams on an IQ heritability puzzle
"To their surprise, they found little in the DNA that stood out."
I'm betting it was more 'disappointment' than 'surprise'. A lot of nice things like longevity, IQ, and health seem to go together and we've known for a long time that, for the genetic components feeding into these characteristics, the aggregate is the combination of lots of little contributions across the genome, and a lot of that is correlated to lower levels of error in alleles that are otherwise common in the population, that is "low genetic load".
It's a hobby of mine to look up how long famous intellectuals lived and it's stunning how many got past 90, with it being a frequent surprise to learn that someone born in the Depression era is still alive. As a random example, I recently heard an old song from the late 1950's from Tom Lehrer (famous satirical musician, music and math prodigy in his youth, invented the Jello Shot while working for NSA). Dead? Nope, he just had his 97th birthday.
Does anyone else share my general disinterest in what the CDC has to say about anything? I carry nearly every form of bias in believing social media absolutely affects children's mental health. I know too many smart kids that tell me they think it's messing their minds up. Of course family has a huge impact on mental health, but dismissing social media as a contributor...(?) I don't care what their analysis says. It definitely messes with my sanity; that's why I rarely engage with it.
For me it's not about "CDC" but more about "mental health." One builds up instincts when switching between different fields of inquiry that are similar to the instincts to throttle up and down vigilance and anxiety when walking through safe neighborhoods in a crowded public space on the one hand or in very rough districts on the other, danger around every corner, at night, drunk, unarmed, down alleys where no one can see you, where every offer is a con, and where and no one will come to your aid if you scream.
"Mental health" is already a bad enough neighborhood. When you combine it with the big picture of this all really being about the extremely-high-stakes battle over potential regulation of social media, then 99% of the time these studies don't withstand even a little scrutiny. Mostly they have stretched things to the very edge of unpublishable embarrassment needed to get to a predetermined reportable 'headline' about the finding, so that that camp can deploy it like identical artillery shells in the bigger war. All Self-Righteous on the Asinine Front.
They are answering a different question from a lot of people with regard to social media. The typical question begins with the observation the self-described mental health of teens and young adults has gotten worse over the last decade or so. Simply saying the kid's family environment may be more important than social media doesn't answer that question unless you either provide evidence the previous observation is incorrect, or something has changed in family environments over the same time period.
The observation they are making may be accurate for the work they did but I believe it runs counter to observations that peer groups have as much or more influence as family after a certain age, and lots of peer group interaction happens on social media now.
Yes. I'm cranked up enough about what I see social media doing to civilization, I have to question their work. That family has a huge impact, certainly. But, the premise of the study just doesn't ring right for me.
Lots of Tom Lehrer songs available for karaoke -- I've sung The Vatican Rag & The Masochism Tango, tho not yet Poisoning Pidgeons in the Park. Here is a good couple of songs including the all-too-still relevant National Brotherhood Week, another favorite, plus the clever Old & Gray (which he mentions "doesn't seem so funny anymore").
A few years ago, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) surprised me in an interview by celebrating and repeating Tom Lehrer's The Elements, which my wife doesn't like so much because they're not in order, but rather an almost rap rhyming form.
Thomas Sowell is also alive at 94, to be 95 June 30 (born 1930).
My model is very much "lower levels of error in alleles that are otherwise common" is the main genetic influence on the outcome for health. Some common standard which is healthy, and many cases of deviation of that standard which are less healthy, and more often leading to death before 80.
For IQ, there are more positive & negative influences, not such a common base line, but still a genetic maximum that can be degraded by sub-optimal environment, but not increased. Thus low IQ 4th graders who are taught with sub-optimal "whole word" methods fail to learn to read above first or second, while the same group being taught phonics reads much better, at third or maybe fourth level (maybe a false "low IQ" test result?).
The real vibe shift will be when it is finally considered to be investigatory malpractice in any human-focused inquiry to -not- include good genetic measurements* in the analysis, and equally malpractice to not require this be done when awarding grants to any research proposal. At this point it's entirely feasible to get a "genetic load index score" from a cheek swap, and probably not that much more expensive to get and use genome data in full resolution.
My hunch (and subject of an "If I had a billion dollars ..." to spend on a research program I could manage) is that if one were to take top-cited study results and audit them with the statistical technique of getting a representative sample of individuals that meet the claimed correlations, and then testing those results against measurements of genetic confounders like load-scores and so forth, that over 80% of results claimed to be robust and important enough to have been implemented in policy would simply vanish far below any reasonable standard of statistical significance.
That kind of epistemic catastrophe would make the "replication crisis" look like a mild annoyance. It would also provide a decent judicially-acceptable rational-basis to justify which subject areas and labs will and won't get public funding in the near future. "Researchers will be eligible for the average they've received in past years and without any reduction except by being multiplied by the degree of replicability of significance in former published results which have since been genetically audited." For a lot of researchers, that is going to end up looking like when recently famous artists receive their latest monthly royalty check from Spotify for $4.13.
*Including aggregate-of-many-small-contributions analysis, and not just looking for isolated allele variations with huge explanatory value. My impression is that this low-hanging fruit has pretty much already been picked.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Except ... It is now possible to find out all 3,000,000,000 base pairs of a person's genome from a cheek swab for less than $100. But we are still in the early stages of figuring out how to go from that to "health" or "IQ".
Robert Plomin's "Blueprint" agrees with you and touts "polygenic scores". They do seem to have great potential. But developing them is turning out to be harder and more complicated than he expected.
"But developing them is turning out to be harder and more complicated than he expected."
Nah, at least, not anymore. Or what's hard about it has radically shifted now that the old bottlenecks of expense of genome resolution and compute have collapsed.
Furthermore, not all "polygenic scores" are created equally. Yeah, throwing a billion genomes and some robustly-validated phenotype feature measurements into a statistical hyper-regressionizer, in order to create some equally hyper-scale "Large Genetic Model" prediction engine is one thing.
But with genetic load, you can't do that, but also, fortunately, you don't need to. You can't do it because load will appear as very rare single-point mutations, and there just won't be enough other people with that same exact single mutation to do meaningful statistics on it. But you don't need to because, at the crudest level, you can literally just add up the total number of "very rare spelling errors in the coding for the closest typical allele variance", for any particular genome genome.
Yeah, some of these 'errors' might be harmless or even helpful, but that's not the way to bet given nature's preference selecting for the typical types, so reasonable to presume it's harmful load. And sure, you could get more sophisticated by then comparing to the big correlated nice things like health, iq, longevity, etc. and allowing for non-linear impacts at higher levels of accumulation, or putting different weights on the impacts to particular genes in particular places.
But at a bare minimum, "just add up the errors" can be done cheaply right now, and measuring and testing against that number should be the bare minimum standard to get funded or published.
UK Biobank has had SNP data for a decade and whole genome sequencing data for its 500,000 participants for two years now, so I searched Google Scholar for "UK Biobank mutation load". There are not many papers that look relevant (publishing opportunity! alas I'm not a biologist) but doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08424-6 (2019) says that "Despite larger rare variant effect sizes, rare variants ([0.07% <] MAF < 1%) explain less than 10% of total SNP-heritability for most [of the 25 traits with best phenotype data] analyzed." The most rare-variant-heavy trait was allergic eczema, and the least rare-variant-heavy traits were smoking status and full lung volume. College education (presumably EduYears) and height were middle of the pack, well below 5% of total SNP-heritability explained by rare variants.
Just before the paywalled part, the WSJ notes that the single biggest factor in aging is exercise, “the single most effective medical intervention that we know.” While it might be disappointing to Arnold that the article doesn't repeat the oft-repeated Correlation does not prove Causation, in his comment he also seems unwilling to note the understated truism that All Causation results in Correlation.
Anybody looking for causation should start with correlations. Not yet proving that some correlation is a causal one, doesn't mean it isn't. Lots of true things aren't proven truth. I do wish there were more college graduate alumni studies -- and even think Fed student loans should require collection of more annual info as taxes are filed yearly. Including weight.
All human results are based on genetic & epigenetic influences, environmental influences, individual behavior choices, and luck, or everything else. Studying the survivors after 80 won't show many of the genetic mistakes that cause/ influence earlier death, because those folks didn't survive. Similarly bad environment, and even bad individual behavior. In this paradigm, what does it even meant to say "better health luck at age 71"? Exercising at Israeli dancing, or not, is not an issue of luck.
For me, I was skiing a couple years ago, for exercise. Then I paused on the slope and a young woman barreled into me, damaging my eye bone, teeth, face, back, & knees. I think of that as bad luck -- good decision to ski for exercise, but bad outcome. Now I exercise (almost) every day, for my back, and usually also a 40 minute walk or so.
Plus I read Arnold Kling & his links a lot to keep up my good spirits, and to learn new things.
You can't teach an old dog to do new things ... so if you're learning new things, you're not an old dog.
Contrary to what I regard as the common wisdom, I think we, today, are calling too many mental illnesses normal. The CDC isn't going to define transgenderism as a mental illness, are they? So one of the inputs to calculating the effects of social media on children and teens is already greatly corrupted.
It is interesting that teen girls have the lowest suicide rate of the groups Ferguson shows in his graph and it is true that (last I knew) Haidt's evidence is mostly or all correlational. Beyond that, Ferguson does a really bad job of refuting Haidt's claims. First, he shows data from 2003-23 to refute a claim made about 2012-present. Second, the claim focuses on liberal girls, not all girls.
Still, the percentage increase for teen girls is larger than any other group. It's not at all clear to me that this is less important than raw numbers increasing more for other groups.
Finally, he makes the argument that because household problems (which exist d long before social media) are a bigger contributor to offspring mental health, we should ignore other contributors to the problem. I shouldn't have to explain why this is silly but I'll note that if the smaller issue is easier to address we can get a bigger bang for the buck.
We could also take his claim about the affect of the household in mental health one step further and say we shouldn't focus just on mental health outcomes or just on the household problems he lists. I'd bet growing up in a single parent household is the biggest contributor to bad outcomes.
Bang for the buck is a very important issue, based on presumed tractability. A smaller influence that can be changed by behavior change is a better focus than a larger influence that can't be changed, perhaps like exercise vs genetic luck.
On the Chris Ferguson one, the relevant question is what has changed over time. If teen mental health has deteriorated but the amount of abuse and neglect is constant, then that’s not a driver of the increase. More related to the baseline.
Awhile back I was visiting my childhood home, and noticed that across the way a house had a tree wrapped with a particular ribbon - was it green - and some sort of memorial sign, commercially printed. A young relative who lived nearby, had killed himself. I then saw that the ribbons were prevalent in the area. I looked up the individual and it was someone who appeared to have been gifted looks, athletic talent, and a successful, promising life.
These things don't matter. Depression is going to take a number of people every year, just like flu - I'm not naive about that.
But when I saw the tiktok video of the pretty girls at the high school crying and mass releasing balloons for their dead friend, I thought: that is very sweet, maybe will be comforting in days ahead for his parents, to know that he was so popular and made an impression in his short life. But also: this affecting ritual probably is *much less* discouraging of suicide than was the Catholic prohibition on it.
There are many ways to look at the relationship between youth and their cell phones. Ferguson seems to go too far in claiming there are no problems that might be at least partially attributable to cell phones. For example, here is a meta analysis of youth "cell phone addiction" and academic performance that finds:
"The findings suggest two important aspects to understanding the effects of smartphone addiction on learning: (1) these results suggest that the greater the use of a phone while studying, the greater the negative impact on learning and academic achievement; (2) the results also suggest that skills and cognitive abilities, that students need for academic success and learning, can be negatively affected by excessive and addictive phone use. The present meta-analysis further reveals that when students have difficulty controlling their smartphone use, there is a potential that they are experiencing smartphone addiction. "
I get the feeling that maybe there are subsets of youth, perhaps certain personality types or who have certain genetic predispositions to addictive behavior, that are negatively affected, but that their numbers are not sufficient to sway population wide averages. It's like saying 30 million children ate peanut butter sandwiches safely yesterday therefore there is no such thing as peanut allergy. This is essentially the same thing happening with "Autism Spectrum Disorder" - the APA just lumped a whole bunch of diverse conditions into one diagnosis and that is going to make it difficult or impossible to prove, for example, that there are certain subsets within the population that may be wholly attributable to genetic disorders (like Rett Syndrome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rett_syndrome ) but when you do an ASD study you can claim that genetics has nothing to do with ASD because not everybody with the ASD diagnosis has the exact same genetic markers.
Another article on AI generated cancer treatments provides a concise summary:
"Treatment response is heterogeneous. However, the classical methods treat the treatment response as homogeneous and estimate the average treatment effects. The traditional methods are difficult to apply to precision oncology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for precision oncology. It can accurately estimate the individualized treatment effects and learn optimal treatment choices. Therefore, the AI approach can substantially improve progress and treatment outcomes of patients."
One suspects data definitions and observational precision are where the consequential work in mental health will be happening as well.
"Compared with their peers, the disease-free subjects were generally thinner, exercised more frequently and seemed “remarkably upbeat,” often with rich social lives."
Do you doubt that these factors increase life expectancy? What's your point?
Regarding the increased heritability with age, in recent research there is sophisticated psychometric modeling that deals with measurement error (reliability). Furthermore, a related finding is that shared environmental effects, which reflect the influence of systematic family environment, decline with age. Shared environmental effects do not reflect measurement error.
"To their surprise, they found little in the DNA that stood out."
I'm betting it was more 'disappointment' than 'surprise'. A lot of nice things like longevity, IQ, and health seem to go together and we've known for a long time that, for the genetic components feeding into these characteristics, the aggregate is the combination of lots of little contributions across the genome, and a lot of that is correlated to lower levels of error in alleles that are otherwise common in the population, that is "low genetic load".
It's a hobby of mine to look up how long famous intellectuals lived and it's stunning how many got past 90, with it being a frequent surprise to learn that someone born in the Depression era is still alive. As a random example, I recently heard an old song from the late 1950's from Tom Lehrer (famous satirical musician, music and math prodigy in his youth, invented the Jello Shot while working for NSA). Dead? Nope, he just had his 97th birthday.
"It's a hobby of mine to look up how long famous intellectuals lived"
I have the same hobby.
Does anyone else share my general disinterest in what the CDC has to say about anything? I carry nearly every form of bias in believing social media absolutely affects children's mental health. I know too many smart kids that tell me they think it's messing their minds up. Of course family has a huge impact on mental health, but dismissing social media as a contributor...(?) I don't care what their analysis says. It definitely messes with my sanity; that's why I rarely engage with it.
For me it's not about "CDC" but more about "mental health." One builds up instincts when switching between different fields of inquiry that are similar to the instincts to throttle up and down vigilance and anxiety when walking through safe neighborhoods in a crowded public space on the one hand or in very rough districts on the other, danger around every corner, at night, drunk, unarmed, down alleys where no one can see you, where every offer is a con, and where and no one will come to your aid if you scream.
"Mental health" is already a bad enough neighborhood. When you combine it with the big picture of this all really being about the extremely-high-stakes battle over potential regulation of social media, then 99% of the time these studies don't withstand even a little scrutiny. Mostly they have stretched things to the very edge of unpublishable embarrassment needed to get to a predetermined reportable 'headline' about the finding, so that that camp can deploy it like identical artillery shells in the bigger war. All Self-Righteous on the Asinine Front.
"....get to a predetermined reportable headline..." Yes. I can't shake that.
They are answering a different question from a lot of people with regard to social media. The typical question begins with the observation the self-described mental health of teens and young adults has gotten worse over the last decade or so. Simply saying the kid's family environment may be more important than social media doesn't answer that question unless you either provide evidence the previous observation is incorrect, or something has changed in family environments over the same time period.
The observation they are making may be accurate for the work they did but I believe it runs counter to observations that peer groups have as much or more influence as family after a certain age, and lots of peer group interaction happens on social media now.
Yes. I'm cranked up enough about what I see social media doing to civilization, I have to question their work. That family has a huge impact, certainly. But, the premise of the study just doesn't ring right for me.
Right.
Tom Lehrer. I saw him live in about 1970 something. The guy is hilarious.
Lots of Tom Lehrer songs available for karaoke -- I've sung The Vatican Rag & The Masochism Tango, tho not yet Poisoning Pidgeons in the Park. Here is a good couple of songs including the all-too-still relevant National Brotherhood Week, another favorite, plus the clever Old & Gray (which he mentions "doesn't seem so funny anymore").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgASBVMyVFI
A few years ago, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) surprised me in an interview by celebrating and repeating Tom Lehrer's The Elements, which my wife doesn't like so much because they're not in order, but rather an almost rap rhyming form.
Thomas Sowell is also alive at 94, to be 95 June 30 (born 1930).
Feeding igeons in the park is one of my all-time favorites.
Poisoning Pigeons In The Park....
https://youtu.be/yhuMLpdnOjY?si=Zm6-9GYFO9rNdc2n
My model is very much "lower levels of error in alleles that are otherwise common" is the main genetic influence on the outcome for health. Some common standard which is healthy, and many cases of deviation of that standard which are less healthy, and more often leading to death before 80.
For IQ, there are more positive & negative influences, not such a common base line, but still a genetic maximum that can be degraded by sub-optimal environment, but not increased. Thus low IQ 4th graders who are taught with sub-optimal "whole word" methods fail to learn to read above first or second, while the same group being taught phonics reads much better, at third or maybe fourth level (maybe a false "low IQ" test result?).
The real vibe shift will be when it is finally considered to be investigatory malpractice in any human-focused inquiry to -not- include good genetic measurements* in the analysis, and equally malpractice to not require this be done when awarding grants to any research proposal. At this point it's entirely feasible to get a "genetic load index score" from a cheek swap, and probably not that much more expensive to get and use genome data in full resolution.
My hunch (and subject of an "If I had a billion dollars ..." to spend on a research program I could manage) is that if one were to take top-cited study results and audit them with the statistical technique of getting a representative sample of individuals that meet the claimed correlations, and then testing those results against measurements of genetic confounders like load-scores and so forth, that over 80% of results claimed to be robust and important enough to have been implemented in policy would simply vanish far below any reasonable standard of statistical significance.
That kind of epistemic catastrophe would make the "replication crisis" look like a mild annoyance. It would also provide a decent judicially-acceptable rational-basis to justify which subject areas and labs will and won't get public funding in the near future. "Researchers will be eligible for the average they've received in past years and without any reduction except by being multiplied by the degree of replicability of significance in former published results which have since been genetically audited." For a lot of researchers, that is going to end up looking like when recently famous artists receive their latest monthly royalty check from Spotify for $4.13.
*Including aggregate-of-many-small-contributions analysis, and not just looking for isolated allele variations with huge explanatory value. My impression is that this low-hanging fruit has pretty much already been picked.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Except ... It is now possible to find out all 3,000,000,000 base pairs of a person's genome from a cheek swab for less than $100. But we are still in the early stages of figuring out how to go from that to "health" or "IQ".
Robert Plomin's "Blueprint" agrees with you and touts "polygenic scores". They do seem to have great potential. But developing them is turning out to be harder and more complicated than he expected.
"But developing them is turning out to be harder and more complicated than he expected."
Nah, at least, not anymore. Or what's hard about it has radically shifted now that the old bottlenecks of expense of genome resolution and compute have collapsed.
Furthermore, not all "polygenic scores" are created equally. Yeah, throwing a billion genomes and some robustly-validated phenotype feature measurements into a statistical hyper-regressionizer, in order to create some equally hyper-scale "Large Genetic Model" prediction engine is one thing.
But with genetic load, you can't do that, but also, fortunately, you don't need to. You can't do it because load will appear as very rare single-point mutations, and there just won't be enough other people with that same exact single mutation to do meaningful statistics on it. But you don't need to because, at the crudest level, you can literally just add up the total number of "very rare spelling errors in the coding for the closest typical allele variance", for any particular genome genome.
Yeah, some of these 'errors' might be harmless or even helpful, but that's not the way to bet given nature's preference selecting for the typical types, so reasonable to presume it's harmful load. And sure, you could get more sophisticated by then comparing to the big correlated nice things like health, iq, longevity, etc. and allowing for non-linear impacts at higher levels of accumulation, or putting different weights on the impacts to particular genes in particular places.
But at a bare minimum, "just add up the errors" can be done cheaply right now, and measuring and testing against that number should be the bare minimum standard to get funded or published.
UK Biobank has had SNP data for a decade and whole genome sequencing data for its 500,000 participants for two years now, so I searched Google Scholar for "UK Biobank mutation load". There are not many papers that look relevant (publishing opportunity! alas I'm not a biologist) but doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08424-6 (2019) says that "Despite larger rare variant effect sizes, rare variants ([0.07% <] MAF < 1%) explain less than 10% of total SNP-heritability for most [of the 25 traits with best phenotype data] analyzed." The most rare-variant-heavy trait was allergic eczema, and the least rare-variant-heavy traits were smoking status and full lung volume. College education (presumably EduYears) and height were middle of the pack, well below 5% of total SNP-heritability explained by rare variants.
Thanks for that reference. I'll check it out.
Just before the paywalled part, the WSJ notes that the single biggest factor in aging is exercise, “the single most effective medical intervention that we know.” While it might be disappointing to Arnold that the article doesn't repeat the oft-repeated Correlation does not prove Causation, in his comment he also seems unwilling to note the understated truism that All Causation results in Correlation.
Anybody looking for causation should start with correlations. Not yet proving that some correlation is a causal one, doesn't mean it isn't. Lots of true things aren't proven truth. I do wish there were more college graduate alumni studies -- and even think Fed student loans should require collection of more annual info as taxes are filed yearly. Including weight.
All human results are based on genetic & epigenetic influences, environmental influences, individual behavior choices, and luck, or everything else. Studying the survivors after 80 won't show many of the genetic mistakes that cause/ influence earlier death, because those folks didn't survive. Similarly bad environment, and even bad individual behavior. In this paradigm, what does it even meant to say "better health luck at age 71"? Exercising at Israeli dancing, or not, is not an issue of luck.
For me, I was skiing a couple years ago, for exercise. Then I paused on the slope and a young woman barreled into me, damaging my eye bone, teeth, face, back, & knees. I think of that as bad luck -- good decision to ski for exercise, but bad outcome. Now I exercise (almost) every day, for my back, and usually also a 40 minute walk or so.
Plus I read Arnold Kling & his links a lot to keep up my good spirits, and to learn new things.
You can't teach an old dog to do new things ... so if you're learning new things, you're not an old dog.
Long comment but I was engrossed from start to end.
Contrary to what I regard as the common wisdom, I think we, today, are calling too many mental illnesses normal. The CDC isn't going to define transgenderism as a mental illness, are they? So one of the inputs to calculating the effects of social media on children and teens is already greatly corrupted.
It is interesting that teen girls have the lowest suicide rate of the groups Ferguson shows in his graph and it is true that (last I knew) Haidt's evidence is mostly or all correlational. Beyond that, Ferguson does a really bad job of refuting Haidt's claims. First, he shows data from 2003-23 to refute a claim made about 2012-present. Second, the claim focuses on liberal girls, not all girls.
Still, the percentage increase for teen girls is larger than any other group. It's not at all clear to me that this is less important than raw numbers increasing more for other groups.
Finally, he makes the argument that because household problems (which exist d long before social media) are a bigger contributor to offspring mental health, we should ignore other contributors to the problem. I shouldn't have to explain why this is silly but I'll note that if the smaller issue is easier to address we can get a bigger bang for the buck.
We could also take his claim about the affect of the household in mental health one step further and say we shouldn't focus just on mental health outcomes or just on the household problems he lists. I'd bet growing up in a single parent household is the biggest contributor to bad outcomes.
Bang for the buck is a very important issue, based on presumed tractability. A smaller influence that can be changed by behavior change is a better focus than a larger influence that can't be changed, perhaps like exercise vs genetic luck.
Watch whether you are using attempts versus deaths. Women are vastly more likely to use less lethal means (pills vs guns) so that skews the numbers.
On the Chris Ferguson one, the relevant question is what has changed over time. If teen mental health has deteriorated but the amount of abuse and neglect is constant, then that’s not a driver of the increase. More related to the baseline.
Eric Topol and intellectual exploration don't belong in the same sentence.
That's fascinating!
Awhile back I was visiting my childhood home, and noticed that across the way a house had a tree wrapped with a particular ribbon - was it green - and some sort of memorial sign, commercially printed. A young relative who lived nearby, had killed himself. I then saw that the ribbons were prevalent in the area. I looked up the individual and it was someone who appeared to have been gifted looks, athletic talent, and a successful, promising life.
These things don't matter. Depression is going to take a number of people every year, just like flu - I'm not naive about that.
But when I saw the tiktok video of the pretty girls at the high school crying and mass releasing balloons for their dead friend, I thought: that is very sweet, maybe will be comforting in days ahead for his parents, to know that he was so popular and made an impression in his short life. But also: this affecting ritual probably is *much less* discouraging of suicide than was the Catholic prohibition on it.
There are many ways to look at the relationship between youth and their cell phones. Ferguson seems to go too far in claiming there are no problems that might be at least partially attributable to cell phones. For example, here is a meta analysis of youth "cell phone addiction" and academic performance that finds:
"The findings suggest two important aspects to understanding the effects of smartphone addiction on learning: (1) these results suggest that the greater the use of a phone while studying, the greater the negative impact on learning and academic achievement; (2) the results also suggest that skills and cognitive abilities, that students need for academic success and learning, can be negatively affected by excessive and addictive phone use. The present meta-analysis further reveals that when students have difficulty controlling their smartphone use, there is a potential that they are experiencing smartphone addiction. "
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958821000622 )
I get the feeling that maybe there are subsets of youth, perhaps certain personality types or who have certain genetic predispositions to addictive behavior, that are negatively affected, but that their numbers are not sufficient to sway population wide averages. It's like saying 30 million children ate peanut butter sandwiches safely yesterday therefore there is no such thing as peanut allergy. This is essentially the same thing happening with "Autism Spectrum Disorder" - the APA just lumped a whole bunch of diverse conditions into one diagnosis and that is going to make it difficult or impossible to prove, for example, that there are certain subsets within the population that may be wholly attributable to genetic disorders (like Rett Syndrome - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rett_syndrome ) but when you do an ASD study you can claim that genetics has nothing to do with ASD because not everybody with the ASD diagnosis has the exact same genetic markers.
More and more it seems like the efficacious treatment methods will be along the lines of AI-powered "personalized medicine": https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-024-10768-5
Another article on AI generated cancer treatments provides a concise summary:
"Treatment response is heterogeneous. However, the classical methods treat the treatment response as homogeneous and estimate the average treatment effects. The traditional methods are difficult to apply to precision oncology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for precision oncology. It can accurately estimate the individualized treatment effects and learn optimal treatment choices. Therefore, the AI approach can substantially improve progress and treatment outcomes of patients."
One suspects data definitions and observational precision are where the consequential work in mental health will be happening as well.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-024-10768-5
"Compared with their peers, the disease-free subjects were generally thinner, exercised more frequently and seemed “remarkably upbeat,” often with rich social lives."
Do you doubt that these factors increase life expectancy? What's your point?
Arnold, Thanks for linking to your 2014 essay about heritability of status (review of G. Clark's book). A superb little essay!
Regarding the increased heritability with age, in recent research there is sophisticated psychometric modeling that deals with measurement error (reliability). Furthermore, a related finding is that shared environmental effects, which reflect the influence of systematic family environment, decline with age. Shared environmental effects do not reflect measurement error.