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Ben Smith's avatar

I'd love to see debate between Jon Haidt and his detractors on this topic--like that 2015 (?) SPSP when he went head-to-head with Kurt Gray--because I find his claims to be pretty convincing and include references to causal studies, and I see critiques like Professor Przybylski's above (caveat: I only watched the first video) tend to make a lot of "correlation!=causation" without addressing the causal evidence that exists.

Specifically, in your discussion there was an assumption there is no experimental evidence for reduced well-being from social media. But Haidt, Rausch, & Twenge's ongoing review [1] currently lists 38 "experiments using random assignment that indicate a causal effect on mental health outcomes". And perhaps no one has specifically run this on children, or maybe the evidence is mixed (Haidt et al's doc also lists another 9 experimental studies that found no effect) but I get the feeling of two groups talking past each other when one side lists 47 mixed experimental findings and the other side seems to be saying there is no evidence at all. I haven't really taken the time to assess those 47 mixed experimental findings--maybe none are relevant or meaningful--but it seems like they need to be grappled with to have a serious debate on this topic?

After a lengthy discussion where Przybylski describes why he thinks Haidt doesn't have the evidence he needs to support his own claims, he then asserts without describing any evidence at all that "abstinence doesn't work". I don't think the analogy to sex abstinence education really carries over any lessons about, say, a school mandating that its students keep cellphones out of the classroom. Surely evidence is required to assert a null effect equally as much as when asserting an effect?

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.npba6tvfpq0g

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