Social Items

TPQ
Showing posts with label Jon Haidt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jon Haidt. Show all posts
After Babel ✏ Freya India explains how algorithms act as conveyor belts, transporting girls to dark and extreme places. Recommended by Henry Joy. 

A note from Jon Haidt

In October 2021, the brilliant Helen Pluckrose introduced me to a young British woman who had written some superb essays about the problems members of Gen Z were facing for her at Areo, Freya wanted to talk with me about a book she was thinking about writing, and I wanted to learn more from her about what young women were experiencing online.

Freya’s writing is compassionate, gripping, and deeply psychological, including essays such as My Generation Isn’t Suffering Enough (which is about antifragility), and Women’s Sexuality is Powerful, Is Onlyfans The Way to Use It? She recently wrote an essay that has haunted me, titled We Can’t Compete with AI Girlfriends. It’s about what is going to happen to young women as ever more young men shack up with gorgeous, witty, programmable AI girlfriends, who can be given proportions and personalities unobtainable by real women . . . 

— Jon

. . . P.S. If you like Freya’s writing, sign up for her Substack, GIRLS where she writes about the challenges girls face in the modern world.

Continue reading @ After Babel.

Algorithms Hijacked My Generation 🔴 I Fear For Gen Alpha

Jon Haidt @ After Babel ➖ and considered a worthwhile read by Christopher Owens. 

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence. Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational.

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). 

Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly).

Most of the news coverage last week noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause.

Continue reading @ After Babel.

Social Media Is A Major Cause Of The Mental Illness Epidemic In Teen Girls

Jon Haidt @ After Babel ➖ and considered a worthwhile read by Christopher Owens. 

This is not just “Kids these days.”

From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” 

If that’s true, then the first half of the Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid?
1. The Case Against Me

Two responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting quotations from previous generations complaining about the behavior of youth. First, see this Twitter thread from Paul Fairie, titled A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled

Fairie includes this 1925 gem:

Remove the girl or boy of today from radio, the telephone, furnace heat, the automobile, the libraries, movies, and other forms of amusement and comfort––give them merely a jackknife and nature’s unchanging wonders for amusement, and how would they fare? 

Continue reading @ After Babel.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)