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I presented several conceptual problems with the skeptics' claims about causality and evidence in this essay: Why Some Researchers Think I'm Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness. For example, I noted that the skeptics focus on testing one narrow model of causality that treats social media consumption as if it were an individual act, like consuming sugar, and then looks for the size of the dose-response relationship in individuals. But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual- level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.

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I presented several conceptual problems with the skeptics' claims about causality and evidence in this essay: Why Some Researchers Think I'm Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness. For example, I noted that the skeptics focus on testing one narrow model of causality that treats social media consumption as if it were an individual act, like consuming sugar, and then looks for the size of the dose-response relationship in individuals. But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual- level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects.
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Just Another Amy (justanotheramy@aus.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 17:22:43 JST Just Another Amy
in reply to

@camwilson @erici
Where, exactly, are the “group-level effects” or “collective action traps” in any of the preceding lists of evidence? This argument takes a sharp turn, introducing concepts not supported by the earlier correlation-heavy studies. If these effects are central to his claims they should have been explicitly measured or analysed in the evidence presented so far.
This feels like a sudden pivot to a new justification without adequate groundwork.

In conversation about 6 months ago from gnusocial.jp permalink