Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2024

The rapid transition from the amazing smartphone to the “pocket moloch”

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:01

Magdalene J. Taylor follows up her New York Times article from last year with more evidence that so many of the social problems identified today are caused by, or at least made worse, by the almost universal addiction to smartphones:

A year ago, I published an opinion essay for the New York Times that changed the trajectory of my career. It was about how fewer Americans are having sex, across nearly every demographic. For any of the usual caveats — wealth, age, orientation — the data almost always highlighted that previous generations in the same circumstances were having more sex than we are today. My purpose in writing the essay was mainly to try to emphasize the role that sex plays in our cultural wellbeing its connection to the loneliness epidemic. Many of us have developed a blasé attitude toward sex, and I wanted people to care. It wasn’t really about intercourse, and I said as much. It was about wanting to live in an lively, energetic society.

Since writing, I have been continuously asked what I think the cause of all this is. Obviously, there isn’t one universal answer. After publishing, I went on radio shows and podcasts and was asked to share what I thought some of them could be. Economic despair, political unrest, even climate fears were among the reasons I’d heard cited. But all of that, honestly, feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands, when in fact I believe it may quite literally be in them.

The problem is obviously our phones.

In February, The Atlantic published a feature about the decline of hanging out. Within it was a particularly damning graph sharing the percentage of teens who report hanging out with friends two or more times per week since 1976. Rates were steady around 80 percent up until the mid-90s, when a subtle decrease began to occur. Then, in 2008 — one year after the release of the first iPhone — the decrease became much more dramatic. It has continued falling sharply since, hovering now at just under 60 percent of teens who spend ample time with friends each week.

Some of us really don’t like our screen time habits criticized. Others may think they appear smarter by highlighting other issues, that they can see above the fray and observe the macro trends that are really shaping our lives, not that stupid anti-phone rhetoric we hear from the Boomers. And some of these other trends do indeed apply. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things happened in 2008. Namely, a financial crisis the effects of which many argue we are still experiencing. When I shared the graph on Twitter/X saying phones are the obvious cause, this was one of the most common rebuttals. Another was the decline in third spaces. There are indeed few places for teenagers to hang out outside of the home. Skate parks are being turned into pickleball courts with “no loitering” signs, malls are shuttering and you can no longer spend $1 on a McChicken to justify hanging out in the McDonald’s dining area for hours. But as the Atlantic piece explains, the dwindling of places to be and experience community has a problem we’ve been lamenting since the 90s. And it’s not just teens — everyone is spending less time together than they used to. “In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own,” the article states.

March 6, 2024

Ted Gioia on escaping from the trap of Dopamine Culture

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Following up on this hot issue, Ted Gioia has some suggestions to get out of the habit:

My dopamine culture essay is still stirring up lots of discussion. And people have their own stories to share.

For example:

And also:

The same thing is happening everywhere — at concerts, at museums, at work, at church, while driving, or even at a funeral.

But it’s even worse when people don’t even try to multitask, instead abandoning essential life tasks—because of the compulsion to scroll.

I’ve now heard from

  • People who scroll instead of sleeping
  • People who scroll instead of engaging in physical activity
  • People who scroll instead of finding a life partner, or connecting with flesh-and-blood people
  • People who scroll instead of gaining skills, finding a job, and pursuing a vocation
  • Etc.

I originally focused on the impact on arts and creativity—because that’s the world I live in. I was worried that people had no patience for a movie or concert or book, because they can only digest stimuli in 15-second bursts.

But I now see that the problem is much, much bigger.

It’s almost quaint to worry about these screen zombies not reading books. The simple fact is that, increasingly, their entire life is suffering because of a technology shift imposed on them by Silicon Valley.

These addictive and compulsive behaviors are troubling. But even more disturbing is how the largest corporations in the world are investing billions in promoting and accelerating this compulsive use of their tech tools.

If you look at the 10 largest companies in the world, half of them are trying to create this addictive relationship to technology. The days when the dealer in addiction had to hide in the shadows are over. They now operate freely in your home, and every other sphere of your life.

A few days ago, I promised to offer concrete suggestions for dealing with this. Some of these are listed below.

February 26, 2024

Time to pry the smartphones from the clutches of our dopamine-addicted youngsters?

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A couple of articles this weekend deal with the already acknowledged problem of dopamine addiction especially among the young whose brains and personalities are still in the formative stages. First, here’s Christopher Gage reporting with some delight that British schoolchildren are going to have to learn how to cope with a full school day without the electronic binkies they’ve grown so dependent on:

Detail of an article at bankmycell.com

I long for the day when gawking at one’s phone like a lobotomy patient invokes derision. Don’t you know your filthy addiction pollutes every atom of our society? You selfish bastard. You perverts should be ashamed of yourselves, etc. That day is on the horizon.

This week, British lawmakers banned smartphones in schools. Those pocket perils are lobotomising those whom sentimentalists call “the nation’s future”. Denied their devil devices, schoolchildren will endure hours of reading, thinking, and writing. Heaven forbid, they’ll talk to their friends and teachers in flesh and blood.

In these matters, I am militant. Children are not vessels of wisdom and wonder corrupted by a cruel world. They’re ignorant. By teaching them how to think and live, adults civilise children. That bleeping burping buzzing beehive in their pockets renders that civilising mission impossible.

Many disagree. But their knee-jerk reaction to this “knee-jerk reaction” crashes against concrete evidence. Smartphones erode concentration, dull critical thinking, blunt memory, and shred retention. The monstrous equation: Smartphones plus face-hugger apps equals ignorant, depressed, anxious youths.


Yes, technology invites moral panic. Plato worried that the written word would mulch minds into mush. But this is serious.

Last year, Dr Vivek Murthy, the United States surgeon general, issued a rare public health advisory. Across 19 pages, Dr Murthy warned that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were “not fully understood”.

“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” he said.

And what did we say? Not much. We had more important matters to attend. If I remember correctly, on that very day, Kim Kardashian revealed on Instagram her latest arse or her newest boyfriend.

However, serious people think this is a serious problem. Dr Benjamin Maxwell, a director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by a study linking social media and poor mental health. That “highly stimulating environment” may corrode “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.”

The UN’s education, science, and culture agency says the more young Jack scrolls through TikTok and the like, the lower his grades sink.

Countless studies show smartphones and their face-hugger apps — designed by behavioural psychologists to addict and milk the user — worsen anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Not to mention lining up children for the predation of bullies 24/7.

Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are the canaries in the cultural coalmine. They say HMS Progress is crashing toward the icebergs — rising rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety. To them, the evidence is almost irrefutable. Turn back now, they say, or the ship sinks.

The second item is a follow-up by Ted Gioia to his post on dopamine culture last week:

My article on “dopamine culture” has stirred up interest and (even more) raised concerns among readers who recognize the symptoms I described.

One of the illustration went viral in a big way. And I’ve gotten requests from all over the world for permission to translate and share the material. (Yes, you can all quote generously from the article, and reprint my charts with attribution.)

This image was shared widely online

But many have asked for more specific guidance.

What can we do in a culture dominated by huge corporations that want us to spend hours every day swiping and scrolling?

I find it revealing and disturbing that readers who work on the front lines (in education, therapy, or tech itself) expressed the highest degree of alarm. They know better than anybody where we’re heading, and want to find an escape path.

Here’s a typical comment from teacher Adam Whybray:

    I see it massively as a teacher. Kids desperately pleading for toilet breaks, claiming their human rights are being infringed, so they can check TikTok, treating lessons as though they’re in a Youtube reaction video, needing to react with a meme or a take — saying that silence in lessons scares them or freaks them out.

    One notable difference from when I was at school was that I remember a lesson in which we got to watch a film was a relief or even pleasurable (depending on the film). My students today often say they are unable to watch films because they can’t focus. I had one boy getting quite emotional, begging to be allowed to look at his phone instead.

Another teacher asked if the proper response is to unplug regularly? Others have already embraced digital detox techniques of various sorts (see here and here).

I hope to write more about this in the future.

In particular, I want to focus on the many positive ways people create a healthy, integrated life that minimizes scrolling and swiping and mindless digital distractions. Many of you have found joy and solace — and an escape from app dependence — in artmaking or nature walks or other real world activities. There are countless ways of being-in-the-world with contentment and mindfulness.

Today I want to discuss just one bedrock of real world life that is often neglected — or frequently even mocked: Ritual.

I know how much I rely on my daily rituals as a way of creating wholeness and balance. I spend every morning in an elaborate ritual involving breakfast, reading books (physical copies, not on a screen), listening to music, and enjoying home life.

Even my morning coffee preparation is ritualistic. (However, I’m not as extreme as this person — who rivals the Japanese tea ceremony in attention to detail.)

I try to avoid plugging into the digital world until after noon.

I look forward to this daily time away from screens. But my personal rituals are just one tiny example. There are many larger ways that rituals provide an antidote to the more toxic aspects of tech-dominated society.

Below I share 13 observations on ritual.

February 16, 2024

“… the rise in emotional disturbance among young women correlates precisely with the introduction of the smart phone”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter sets off all the alarms with a proposal to address the burgeoning issue of social media addiction and the closely correlated rise in mental health issues among young women:

The psychic breakdown of the young Western female has been the defining political phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Women are suffering from depression, anxiety, neurosis, and dysphoria as never before, they’re drugged to the gills to deal with it, and they’ve got the SSREyes to prove it.

This isn’t only a problem for young women. Their suffering is everyone’s suffering. The romantic paranoia engendered by MeToo, a mass hysteria that has grown directly out of this plague of neurosis, has destroyed courtship among the young. As a result a shocking fraction of young men are virgin incels, while their femcel counterparts are contemplating a future where 45% of them will be childless. Driven by their neglected ovaries to latch on to surrogate children in the form of migrants and minorities, and entering into lesbian civil unions with the Mammy State, childless women overwhelmingly vote left – as always, the party of the psychically distressed thrives to whatever degree it cultivates psychic distress. The political derangement is downstream of their emotional derangement, and the two feed on one another in a vicious spiral of crazed minds pushing crazed policies that craze minds yet further, a cycle that threatens to break civilization, either gradually through steady demographic deflation and spiritual demoralization, or perhaps – if the young men alienated by a society that has ruined their women cease stupefying themselves with porn, and cohere as an army – more catastrophically.

There’s no real mystery as to why this has happened.

Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated at length and in extraordinary empirical detail that the rise in emotional disturbance among young women correlates precisely with the introduction of the smart phone, and the mass migration of social lives onto social media that immediately followed. The slot machine engineers of Silicon Valley trapped the world’s young women in a Skinner box by hacking their instinctive sexual competition strategies. Suddenly every young girl in the world was measuring herself against every other young woman, all viewing one another through the distorting filters of flattering camera angles, ruthlessly curated digital photographs, makeup, plastic surgery, and AI filters that smoothed wrinkles, removed blemishes, and reduced unwelcome poundage. On the Internet no girl is ever the prettiest girl in the room, or even the second or third prettiest. Meanwhile they’re flooded with a relentless barrage of that most intoxicating of drugs: male attention.

Of course they went mad.

They’re all wandering around in a state of selfie-shock.

January 2, 2024

Vugrek’s Cell Phone Gun for Organized Crime

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Sept 2023

The Vugrek family of Croatia (Marko Sr, Marko Jr, and Ivan) were talented firearms designers, who ended up supplying organized crime. Their best-known development was the Agram 2000 submachine gun, a very well-built weapon submitted to Croatian military trials in the early 1990s. In the wake of prosecution for making the Agram illicitly after its military rejection, Marko Vugrek developed a number of guns specifically for illicit use, including this well-done cell phone gun. They began to turn up in the Balkans and throughout Europe around 2007, and investigations traced them back to their Croatian creator.

A big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum (Muzej Policije) in Zagreb for giving me access to film this rare piece for you! Check them out at: https://muzej-policije.gov.hr
(more…)

November 27, 2023

The slackening pace of technological innovation

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer thinks we’re living off the diminishing fumes of a much more innovative and dynamic era:

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall – three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

At one point, I was giving my little spiel about how we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation – that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side. You’ve heard this from me before, and as before I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Of course definitional issues are paramount here, and we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change. Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable. The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter? I think a few weeks of pooping in the backyard and having no running water to wash your hands or take a shower would probably change your tune. And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a remarkable extent, continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.

ANYWAY. You’re probably bored of this line from me by now. But I was talking about this to these college kids, none of whom were alive in a world without widespread internet usage. We were talking about how companies market the future, particularly to people of their age group. I was making fun of the new iPhone and Apple’s marketing fixation on the fact that it’s TITANIUM. A few of the students pushed back; their old iPhones kept developing cracks in their casings, which TITANIUM would presumably fix. And, you know, if it works, that’s progress. (Only time and wear and tear will tell; the number of top-of-the-line phones I’ve gone through with fragile power ports leaves me rather cynical about such things.) Still, I tried to get the students to put that in context with the sense of promise and excitement of the recent past. I’m of a generation that was able to access the primitive internet in childhood but otherwise experienced the transition from the pre-internet world to now. I suspect this is all rather underwhelming for us. When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.

Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go? In the early days there was this boundless optimism about what these things might someday do. The cameras, obviously, were a big point of emphasis, and they have developed to a remarkable degree, with even midrange phones now featuring very high-resolution sensors, often with multiple lenses. The addition of the ability to take video that was anything like high-quality, which became widespread a couple years into the smartphone era, was a big advantage. (There’s also all manner of “smart” filtering and adjustments now, which are of more subjective value.) The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”? I’m sure the cameras will continue to get refined, forever. And maybe that marginal value will mean something, anything at all, in five or ten or twenty years. Maybe it won’t. But no one even pretends that it’s going to be a really big deal. Screens are going to get even more high-resolution, I guess, but again – is there a single person in the world who buys the latest flagship Samsung or iPhone and says, “Christ, I need a higher resolution screen”? They’ll get a little brighter. They’ll get a little more vivid. But so what? So what. Phones have gotten smaller and they’ve gotten bigger. Some gimmicks like built-in projectors were attempted and failed. Some advances like wireless charging have become mainstays. And the value of some things, like foldable screens, remains to be seen. But even the biggest partisans for that technology won’t try to convince you that it’s life-altering.

October 11, 2023

In their attacks on southern Israel, Hamas is “making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone”

Chris Bray explains the otherwise insane tactics employed by Hamas terrorists:

The border area between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, 9 October 2023.
Map by Ecrusized via Wikimedia Commons.

Hamas broke through a fortified border, had unchallenged freedom of movement inside Israel for a shockingly long time, and attacked … a dance music festival and some kibbutzim. Not airfields, not fuel depots, not power stations, not army motor pools to deny mobility to the enemy. They went after soft targets first, and focused especially on women and children. Eyewitness reports and footage of female hostages are telling us that Hamas engaged in sustained sexual violence, and took care to make it known. A subhed in Tablet: “Scenes of young women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends.”

And I think we know what this means.

But first, look at the proposed explanations offered in the news:

    It seems that Hamas, also, is trying to force Israel into negotiations. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a note in Hebrew to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting he take a “calculated risk” by agreeing a long-term truce. While Netanyahu agreed to some easing of pressure on Gaza, he was unwilling to accept Hamas’s long-term demands, including a large-scale prisoner swap, lifting the siege by opening the international border crossing, and establishing a port and airport in Gaza. After 16 years of siege and several catastrophic rounds of war, in which thousands of Gaza residents have been killed, Hamas may be hoping to break the deadlock.

That’s not it. Here’s another try:

    Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel …

    To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to engage in atrocities is not to justify their killing civilians. There is a difference between explanation and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s attack may be explicable even as it is morally indefensible.

So the much-repeated claim is that Hamas in engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, sending messages to nation-states. They used mass rape at a dance festival to gain leverage in negotiations over a possible new port.

That’s absolutely not it, and I strongly suspect that the presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1.) families with children and 2.) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.

Mass rape by armies is not a mystery; it has been studied carefully.

Group X, as a group and deliberately, rapes women from Group Y in Neighborhood Z so women from Group Y never feel that they can safely return to Neighborhood Z, in a tribal memory passed down to later generations. Now the space belongs to Group X.

Hamas is making sites of trauma. To empty them, and to keep them empty.

Their military objective is to use the witnessed mass rape of women, the documented hunting and torture of families, and the videotaped murder of children in front of their parents to keep Jews out of southern Israel in the future. Their military target is site-specific Jewish fertility.

In the comments, Chris also points out the military insanity of how Hamas is implementing the propaganda aspects of their plan:

It’s insane for infantry to carry cellphones into combat, because cellphone locations can be tracked. But Hamas seems to be recording everything they do, and they’re stopping to upload new footage as they capture it. They’re taking the risk of carrying trackable devices in combat for the intended benefit of the display. I’d be very curious to hear if they’re all carrying standardized, organization-issued cellphones, and I’d be very curious to see a detailed analysis of where all of the footage is appearing first. This is a deliberate information operation.

Hamas has clearly calculated that the risk is worth the propaganda bonanza they are reaping from the atrocities being beamed almost in real time to the outside world.

October 8, 2023

QotD: Internet – pro and con

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hate to say “it’s a generational thing”, but it’s a generational thing.

Those of us who came of age before Endless September still regard the Internet as a tool. I can do online in two minutes what used to take me two hours in meatspace. For instance, when I first started working full time, I’d have to waste my entire lunch break on the first Monday of every month taking my physical paycheck down to the brick-and-mortar bank, where I’d fill out a bunch of paper to move money around, which I’d hand to a real person who took her sweet goddamn time filing it, and so on. Fight traffic all the way there, fight traffic all the way back, and yeah, that’s a full hour, even when the bank is relatively close. If that bank is closed, or there’s road construction or something, I’d have to spend all Saturday morning doing it, because banks kept bankers’ hours and so I’d better get there and get it done during the three-hour window the brick-and-mortar place was open. And since everyone else on earth was in the same situation …

These days, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I stepped a real foot inside a physical bank. There’s simply no need. Everything is automatic. Which is convenient, no doubt, but that’s ALL it is: I’ve saved X minutes / hours in my day, which I can use to do other stuff. Other stuff like “see my friends” or “take a walk” or “read a book”. You know, real person stuff. I might read the book online; I might check my email if there’s nothing else to do; but there too the Internet is just a boredom-alleviation tool; something conveniently to hand that passes the time when there’s no other easily accessible way to pass the time.

I would find it inconvenient, sometimes extremely so, to throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, but the thought doesn’t fill me with dread. Oh, the Net’s down? Shrug.

Not so with the younger generations. I have friends I haven’t seen in weeks, months, years, but when we get together again, it’s like we were never apart, because we met in meatspace and have so much real, personal interaction to fall back on. Younger generations have “friends” they’ve never met in the flesh. Not once. Tell me “Hey, you’re not going to be able to see Tim for a few months” and it’s no big thing. I can still call Tim, or write Tim a letter, or just catch up with him when he gets back, to hear all the cool stories he has. Tell the younger folks “Tim is offline” and they freak the fuck out. Tim is inseparable from the Pocket Moloch in a way we oldsters can only dimly grasp.

They would, I’m sadly sure, prefer to interact with Tim entirely digitally. If you haven’t done it yet, try to find some young people hanging out in a group. It’s actually not the easiest thing to do – which should tell you something right there – but if you manage it, you’ll notice that they spend more time texting than they do talking to each other. And here’s the real kicker: Half the time, they’re texting each other. The same people who are physically right there.

That’s a mentality I can’t begin to grasp. I wonder if it can be broken. I’m not optimistic.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-07-07.

March 14, 2023

Social media, selfies, and depression

Filed under: Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Jonathan Haidt notes the inflection point at which young liberal women started to become depressed at a much higher rate than the rest of the population — a trend that has continued for over a decade:

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the COVID shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.

Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19–24, 2020.
Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks — since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens — there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction — Gimbrone, Bates, Prins & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs”. Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major U.S. survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).

Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

    Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:

    Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”

March 9, 2023

Want to feel more depressed? Spend more time with your smartphone

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer is convinced that much of the reason for widespread depression among teenagers can be traced directly to their obsessive devotion to the online world through their smartphones:

Are smartphones to blame for the mental health crisis among teens? The debate has picked up steam lately, in part because of the steady accumulation of evidence that they are indeed, at least partially. (As you know, I’m a believer.) Jonathan Haidt has done considerable work marshaling this evidence. But there’s an attendant question of how phones make kids miserable, if indeed they do. In this post I offer some plausible answers. This is mostly just speculation and I don’t know if the proffered explanations can be tested empirically.

I want to start by establishing a sort of meta-layer on which a lot of these problems rest. We might be inclined to say that these problems are inherently problems of the internet/online life/digital culture, rather than smartphones as such; you can be hurt by what I’m going to describe from a laptop as well as from a smartphone. And I think that’s right, except for one key difference: ubiquity. No matter how portable and light it is, you’re not reflexively checking your laptop on the subway platform or in the bathroom. The iPhone took all of the various pathologies of the internet, made it possible for them to be experienced repetitively and at zero cost morning and night, and dramatically scaled up the financial incentives for companies to exploit those pathologies for gain. You can certainly have an unhealthy relationship with the internet when it’s confined to your desktop. But phones make relentless conditioning and reflexive engagement a mass phenomenon.

The other overriding factor here is the fact that adolescents are still developing mentally, and thus are likely more susceptible to these problems.

Constant exposure to unachievable conditions. Back in my youth, you might watch an MTV show about how rich people lived, or leaf through a magazine like US Weekly, and be exposed to opulence and material excess. Or you might go on vacation and see how the other half lives if you took a tour of the Hollywood hills or whatever. You were perfectly well aware that rich people and their privileged lives existed. But then you turned off the show or you put down the magazine or your vacation ended, and unless you were born rich, you lived in an environment that of necessity was modest and real. Your friends might have lived in nice houses, but you didn’t see riches everywhere you looked, and your definition of what a hot girl looked like was mostly derived from the girls you went to school with. Your environment conditioned the scope of your desires.

Now, exposure to lifestyles that are completely unachievable is constant. Instagram is a machine for making you feel like whatever you’ve got isn’t enough. (That’s how it functions financially, through advertising idealized lives.) There are young people out there who have arranged their various feeds such that they’re always a few seconds away from seeing concerts they can’t attend, cars they can’t drive, houses they can’t live in, clothes they can’t wear, women they can’t fuck or whose bodies they can’t have, places they can’t travel to, food they can’t eat, and lives they can’t live. When I was young, if I wanted to see a picture of a Ferrari, I had to seek out a picture of a Ferrari. It was hard to see suggestive photos of intimidatingly hot women, which is why the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was a big deal. Mostly, the world around you was quotidian and its pleasures attainable. What can it be doing to these generations of young people, having completely unrealistic visions of what life is like being shoved into their brains all the time? How could their actual lives ever compare?

(Incidentally, I am thoroughly convinced that a majority of self-described incels are men who could find meaningful and fulfilling sexual and romantic success, both short-term and long, but who have developed such a wildly unrealistic idea about what actual human women look like that their standards are laughably high. And it’s easy to make fun of that, but I also think that the conditioning inherent to constantly looking at filtered and photoshopped pictures is powerful.)

February 2, 2023

QotD: “Selfies”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I do not take selfies, but (if I am to tell the truth) it is not because I am appalled at the vacuity doing so seems to require, or at least to call forth: Sheep in a field are more like Rodin’s Thinker than are people who hold their phones on those ridiculous sticks before their faces. No, the problem is that, where the camera and I are concerned, it is not that it never lies, but that it never tells the truth.

I am always appalled by its results. I do not look like that when I glance in the mirror: I look far younger, less bald, wrinkled, ugly in short. I conclude, of course, that I lack that mysterious quality that only some lucky people have: I am not photogenic. If the camera never lied, if it showed me as I truly am, I would come out much better in photos.

I think it was the French-Romanian writer Emil Cioran who said that if a man knew that someone would one day write a biography of him, he would cease to live; in other words, it would paralyze him. In like fashion, if I thought that people would photograph me, I would stay indoors — the millions of spy cameras everywhere don’t count, no one looks at what they have recorded until there has been a murder or a terrorist attack (and then everyone is mostly unrecognizable).

I conclude, therefore, that most people who take selfies are at least minimally satisfied with their appearance, however they may appear to others. But in fact it hardly requires reflection on the selfie as a social, or antisocial, phenomenon to know that very large numbers of people have no idea what they look like to others. Or perhaps it is simply that they don’t care.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Suit Yourselfie”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-09-16.

January 1, 2023

QotD: The amazing economic impact of mobile phones in the developing world

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the interesting findings about mobile phones is that they grow the economy. In a country without a general landline network – ie, all the poor ones – 10% of the population gaining a mobile increases GDP by 0.5%. No, not the growth rate goes up from 2% to 2.01%. But an additional 0.5% of GDP each year. Which is, by the standards of these things, pretty big.

We also know why too. Being able to contact people means that markets complete, contracts and transactions are possible. It’s no longer necessary to near randomly meet someone physically in order to be able to organise a transaction. Thus more transactions happen – the value added in voluntary transactions being that GDP which is increasing.

Tim Worstall, “Mobile Phones Cut The Murder Rate – For the Same Reason They Grow The Economy”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-30.

November 16, 2022

Can Plant Identification Apps Be Used for Foraging?

Filed under: Environment, Food, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atomic Shrimp
Published 8 Jul 2022

There are numerous smartphone apps that assist with identification of plants. A lot of people have proposed these for use in identification of plants to forage for the table. Just how good are these apps, and is it safe to use them in that way?
(more…)

July 19, 2022

Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains the really important lesson that seems to have escaped a lot of the critics who covered the Rogers internet/cell/TV outage that took a third of the country offline for 24 hours or more:

Most of the conclusions reached after the Rogers telecommunication outage two weeks ago are wrong. Millions of people lost home internet, television and cellphone service for the better part of a day (some for much longer). For those who had all their services bundled with Rogers, this meant being entirely cut off, including from access to emergency services. It was a big deal, both in terms of lost economic productivity and for those Canadians who needed help and could not access it.

The problem isn’t with Rogers, though. The problem is with everyone else.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Rogers is bad. It did have a big problem. I am not a fan. Their customer service is generally awful. Their reliability and performance is decidedly meh and the meh costs a fortune. So don’t take this column as some sort of apologia for Rogers. I am one of their customers, but I’m only one of their customers because none of the other options are much better.

But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where things in Canada simply functioned better. Close your eyes and just dream it up. You’re in a different Canada now. The CRTC is awesome. Our politicians are terrific. Rogers is an incredibly good company that is masterful at delivering services that are overwhelmingly reliable and affordably priced. Even in this increasingly far-fetched parallel timeline, no telecom company is going to bat a thousand. You will never have 100 per cent service reliability. This alternate Canada still has outages — maybe they’re rare and brief, but they’re not unheard of or impossible.

And that’s why we can’t look at what happened two weeks ago as a failure at Rogers. Obviously Rogers failed. But the real failure was a failure of imagination and planning on the behalf of millions of individuals, and a worryingly diverse set of institutions, that did not have a back-up plan.

How dating apps have changed the dating world

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson on the changes dating sites have accelerated in the dating community:

    In the United States, 35 percent of Tinder users are college students ages 18 to 24 … ‘I’ve heard a joke on campus that goes something like this: ‘First base is hooking up, second base is talking, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dating’. (source).

I am just old enough to remember what the dating scene was like before the rise of Tinder and other dating/hook-up apps. It has changed a lot.

2012 was another world in many ways.

The situation has changed for everyone on the dating market. Even those who don’t use these apps. This is because even for the people who don’t use the apps, they still live in an environment where others use them. Over time, those who don’t use apps must adapt to the preferences and behavior of those who use them. Not the other way around.

One example of how the scene has changed. I have a friend from college. A good-looking guy. He showed me how many women he has matched with: More than 21,000. Twenty-one thousand. Tinder actually identified him as a valuable user early on, and gave him free perks and upgrades. They lifted his radius restrictions. This allowed him to match with even more women. I have another friend. Doesn’t have the best pictures on his profile. But not a bad looking guy. Over roughly the same period of time as my other friend, he has matched with seven women.

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

One way dating apps might be changing the dating scene. People used to have to go out to meet people. And it was costly to lose a relationship partner, in part because of the process involved in meeting someone new. Today, people know that a new partner is a few swipes away. Partners might be more replaceable. If things start deteriorating with their current partner, some can pull out a goldmine in their pocket.

There may be some sexual stratification going on as well. My two friends are examples of the above finding that being slightly more attractive as a man leads to far more matches.

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