Kids today something something.
In related news I recently told two Manhattan tweens that when I was their age I had never heard of manchego. They looked upon me with gentle pity.
I'm not going to read the article, because fuck him. But unfogged was sucking in a lot more of my time before cell phones. Or at least before I had a smart phone. I was lightly supervised and had this open on one tab perpetually.
I've discovered that logging out of sites really helps me in cutting down usage, because logging back in takes thought and the conscious part of my brain knows I didn't actually want to go to Twitter.
I'm also trying to stop using my phone while walking.
From the transcript (which is extremely long):
[Haidt] points out that rates of various markers of teen mental health are flat, and then all of a sudden, they explode in 2010. And this is essentially the heart of the book, that there's a strong correlation between adoption of smartphones in roughly 2010 and this huge spike in suicidality, self-harm, all of these markers also in 2010. That's the core of the book, is just these two lines going up at the same time. But the adoption of smartphones was not the only thing that happened around 2010. The other big thing is the implementation of Obamacare.
So, the percentage of kids in America who didn't have access to health insurance had actually been steadily dropping from the 1990s. But the implementation of the Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage to a huge number of children and also increased access to private insurance plans. So, what you find is that in 1997, around 14% of kids were uninsured, and by 2016, that's down to 5%. So, around the same time, for both adults and kids, you start to see much more Medicaid coverage of mental health admissions to the hospital. You see more diagnosis. You see more prescriptions. Just kind of overall access to mental health care treatment really did significantly expand as part of the implementation of Obamacare.
Another thing that happened was there was guidance from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that recommended screening adolescent girls for depression starting in 2011. It also made it mandatory for insurance companies to cover it. [...] There was also guidance around the same time that instructed doctors to add suicidal ideation as a cause of harm to medical records. I mean, this is another thing that he glosses over, that the numbers were actually rising of teen mental health problems before smartphones. So, he's a little bit off on the timeline and he's a little bit off on the age groups because 10- to 14-year-olds didn't actually have cell phones at that time. That was actually much later. So, they don't actually match up perfectly. And people in the medical system were already very concerned about these steady rises in suicidality and self-harm, especially for adolescent girls. And so, there's a really interesting study of medical records in New Jersey that notes throughout the entire state what looks like a huge increase in suicide attempts and hospitalizations for self-harm.
There's no actual difference in the numbers, it's just they're writing down suicidal ideation as a sub cause of the injury. There is other things too. In 2008, there's something called the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which improves access to mental health care. For teens, there's also the update of the DSM in 2013, which loosens a lot of diagnostic criteria. This was just a period, totally independent of smartphones, where teens were just getting more access to the healthcare system in general, and there was a lot more focus on getting teens the mental health help that they needed. So, I don't want to say that this whole thing is fake. The fact that kids are feeling worse does appear to be real. And there's lots of statistics on this that do not depend on things like hospitalizations or diagnoses of depression.
Shortened attention spans and ubiquitous constant presence of distracting or misleading images and video, maybe personal ones, I see the problem this way. A cell phone whose owner can and sometimes does put it down and read something longer form (or I guess watch something more careful, there are great lectures and interviews), I don't see that as a problem. Don't know what to say about cellphone induced anxiety, maybe a legit concern? Wouldn't just happen in the US
More:
Peter: Small associations still exist as adolescents who report more depressive symptoms also tend to report spending more time online. However, a review of meta-analyses, recent large scale preregistered studies, and daily assessments of digital technology usage showed that associations between time online and internalizing symptoms are often A, mixed between positive, negative, and null finding, B, when present, likely too small to translate into meaningful effects, and C, typically not distinguishable in terms of likely cause and effect.
Michael: Essentially, the research is all over the place. At just the most basic level, are kids who are on their phones less happy than kids who are not on their phones? We can't even really say anything definitive. And to the extent that we do find associations, they're extremely small. And another thing that you find in the literature is, this turns out to be remarkably difficult to study. So, the first problem is, how much are kids on their phones? The vast majority of the data on this is from these huge surveys that they give to tens of thousands of kids every year. Do you remember these? You'd go to homeroom and then you'd have a questionnaire with 300 questions on it. And it would be like, "How much do you do drugs? How much do you drink? How much money do your parents earn?" It would just ask you a million things.
Peter: I have absolutely no recollection of this. [laughs]
Michael: Do you not? I used to lie on them because I thought it was funny. I would just fill out like, "Yes, coke, yes, I impregnated somebody last week." [...] The way this works is you give these surveys to tens of thousands of kids a year, and then you make the data available and people can comb through it for all kinds of stuff. It's hundreds of questions, many of them. And so, you can correlate, like, kids with divorced parents are more likely to be left handed or whatever the fuck.
Peter: That's why they get divorced. Yeah.
More --I think they make a good argument that, even if there's a good reason to be concerned about smart phones and social media, it isn't a good book to explore that*.
Michael: I want to talk a little bit about what I think is one of the harms of the book. I don't want to go overboard, because we've read way more harmful books than this, but I think when we find bad parenting and harmful parenting, it's often along the lines of, you must do this specific thing. You must become a doctor. You must do ballet. You have this very specific thing in mind. And Haidt is basically doing this with nature. He has this idea that being outside is intrinsically good for you, and being on your phone is intrinsically bad for you. This just doesn't show up in the literature at all.
...
Michael: When you listen to his interviews and when you really go through the book, you don't get the sense of somebody who truly cares about teen mental health. You get the sense of somebody who hates social media. Yeah, the experience of social media that he's describing here where everybody's walking on eggshells and you can get yelled at any time and it's bringing out the worst in people. That is not the experience of a 13-year-old girl on Instagram. That is the experience of a middle-aged center right political pundit on like Twitter and Substack.
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: Throughout this book, he shows no interest in what kids are actually doing on their phones. You learn nothing about teenage social media use from reading this book. I think there's something more complicated to this than just a straightforward moral panic. But he speaks about social media the way that previous moral panickers talked about TV and video games.
Peter: God damn it.
Michael: He says in this awestruck section of the book, he says "Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world's wisdom traditions."
* Which is, of course, just confirming my prior belief. I haven't read the book and was wary about it from the beginning.
Cell phones are definitely bad for me -- it is a constant effort not to stare at mine, and if I'm even slightly tired or unhappy I don't manage it. But I don't have any real idea how to improve the situation.
9: I find it easy to lose lots of time scrolling as empty filler time. Depending on the author (in this genre), they wish that we were bored instead, so that our minds would wander. That seems like a harder sell -- I get "touch grass instead of doom scrolling all day" and think that's a good argument, but "be bored instead of watching something in the 5 minute snippets of standing in line" seems contrary to human nature. Even pre-cellphone, that's when people would pick up Weekly World News or similar and skim it while waiting for their groceries to reach the cashier.
My goal isn't zero time spent mindlessly reading things, some is fine and as you say something old and normal. But I would like to decrease that time, and increase the time spent "bored." For one thing I tend to think about math during that "bored" time, and so that's good for me in terms of doing better research. The other thing is that "bored" time can lead to reflection in ways that I think are positive. In particular, time walking seems really low hanging fruit in this direction.
"Touch grass" always seems like a clear exhortation to deal with my horrible, un-dealt-with messy dead lawn, and I resent it. It might be better for my mental health than the internet.
Oddly enough, the phone itself holds very little interest for me. I use it for 2fa, occasional messaging, navigation, and as an alarm clock, and occasionally browsing or reading ebooks and Wikipedia articles in bed. It's so non-compulsive that I miss messages all the time. The laptop has always been my drug of choice. At this point, it's 100% clear to me that my mental health would have been terrible on a lifelong basis no matter what technological or social environment surrounded me, and the one I'm in is honestly pretty good (if not Panglossian). Depression can play out in path-dependent ways, but a path isn't simply a "cause."
I don't touch grass because of ticks.
Touching ticks is basically doomscrolling.
11: I enjoy walking and getting exercise a lot and can pay attention to things around me when I do that. My dog wants to sniff a lot and doesn't want to walk fast, so I often find walking with her boring. I do find standing still really hard, physically. It could be be related to having hypermobile joints and a core that is insufficiently strong, but think it's probably a mental thing. I often pace and struggle to stand still in lines.
I do find it hard to sit still without reading or watching something. That means if I sit down on a bench on a walking trail, I tend to pull out my phone.
For me "bored" can lead to thinking or withdrawal and apathy.
12: My family is full of mental health problems that were clearly not caused by technology. My paternal grandmother was psychiatrically hospitalized multiple times in the 50's. I don't think you can blame that on cell phones, or even television. (They were early adopters of television, I.e. the first family on the block to have one, because my grandfather worked for Sylvania. I would have had some challenges not matter what the technological environment.
I don't have a personal laptop anymore. At this point,I wouldn't dream of going on unfogged using a work computer, so I'm mostly using my iPad.
Unless depression and alcoholism are now seen as illnesses, my family was fine before cell phones.
Drinking alone is the original doomscrolling.
But I would like to decrease that time, and increase the time spent "bored." For one thing I tend to think about math during that "bored" time, and so that's good for me in terms of doing better research.
For me, there is high quality bored, and there is low quality bored, and the difference is ambient noise and what's being required of me. A lot of life with small children is low quality bored. Going for a walk is high quality bored. My commute is high quality bored, but driving the kids to activities is (sometimes, not always) low quality bored.
We don't touch grass because we xeriscaped the lawn. The kids helped with laying the stone for the planter beds and everyone who drove by marveled at the kids doing outside things with their parents instead of inside playing on the iPad, so this comment is on topic.
I can't remember if Haidt speech is better or worse than Chait speech.
19: I would love to hear more about DIY xeriscaping, just in time for seasonal downpours. Did you have to abate an existing lawn?
(Also, still thinking of your situation with compassion and outrage. And hope.)
Don't touch grass, lurid! Wear gloves!
OT: Matthew Broderick looking old really makes me feel old.
Shouldn't the one guy be in prison for knocking someone off a building?
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https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/analysis/can-china-reverse-the-tide-of-myanmars-spring-revolution.html
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Does California have ticks?
Yes but not Lyme Disease, until recently.
You should try to get the kind without Lyme disease.
I thought California Fence Lizards kept the ticks under control. Or something with a name almost that silly.
19: Thanks. Our college got together and while I think we'll still lose the major, basically every other program said they'd merge or give up an unfilled line or something to try to make up the budget deficit and another colleague decided 'welp it's time to unionize', which is currently illegal but who cares and it is going to be funny as hell if I take all the energy I've put into this institution for the past few years and dump it into unionizing. The dean thinks we can do this without losing any jobs or programs, but the university is going to show cuts and I think my math is better than the dean's, unfortunately.
So, DIY xeriscaping! We did have to remove the existing lawn, but it was in very rough shape as we were coming out of a couple of years of drought, the yard gets very nearly 12 hours of direct sun in the summer, and our microclimate is also quite windy. So when we cut the sod it crumbled to dust, which still meant that we had to move ~6000 pounds of sod to the dump.
We planned the whole thing ourselves. Our climate is dry, but it's not the desert southwest. Most of the water comes as snow, and springs tend to be wet, so we decided against a rock-mulched xeriscape in favor of large brick planter beds mulched with wood chips and flagstone-chip pathing. So, we removed the lawn, determined where the beds would be by first getting into a massive argument about ellipses in the front yard and then freehanding the plan with spray paint on the dirt and adjusting the curves of the beds and path widths to be consistent and aesthetically pleasing. We also rerouted the sprinkler system and turned everything in the front yard into drip irrigation. The yard already had large garden beds along the perimeter, so the end result is a xeriscaped perimeter except for the feral rosebushes along the fence, four xeriscaped beds around the two existing young cherry trees, and a path that winds around the beds and around the side of the house into the backyard.
We rented a sod cutter and a soil compacting machine called a wackerpacker for tamping the dirt. The first design was for a single layer of bricks for the planter but we doubled it when we realized it would look better with two layers and ordered another pallet. We did all the work ourselves, and it took us about eight weeks from start to finish with working mostly on evenings and weekends (and a few early mornings to beat the sun when it was 100 degrees.) Also everyone in the entire neighborhood will use this as an excuse to stop by and ask questions and praise your kids for being outside doing yardwork.
My advice for anyone doing this would be to sit down and calculate your budget first. Lots of people are xeriscaping locally, and lots of people aren't looking into the cost of rocks until after they've killed the lawn, and there are some unfortunately sad yards that are now just woodchips. My second piece of advice: take whatever you think you're going to spend on plants in your initial budget, and double it. You want it to look awesome, so don't skimp on the plants. Third piece of advice, which is actually the most important: the internet will say you can use pea gravel to make beautiful paths. Do not do this. Pea gravel does not compact. You will not be able to walk on your paths and pea gravel migrates everywhere. If you want pathing, you want flagstone chips, which compact to a firm surface. They are initially more expensive, but you figured out your budget first, so you are fine.
Our project cost us just under $8000 with us doing all the labor and planning, and $1500 of that was plants. Local quotes were around $20-$30K, so maybe start by marrying a Canadian redneck.
We just don't have a yard to speak of.
I DIYed my xeriscaping. I had to do it super cheap because I had just used up my every last dollar buying my house. I paid some guy to tear out the existing lawn, and then I went to the nursery and bought a bunch of California natives and other drought tolerant plants, and planted them myself. Then the old man across the street saw what I was doing and chided me for spending money on plants. He broke branches off of all the succulents in his yard and brought over a couple of plastic grocery bagsful, which I then just stuck in the ground. This was really nice because it would otherwise have been really spare.
I then proceeded to almost entirely neglect the yard. Some of the plants died, and I pulled those out and planted more of whatever survived, and the result is that my yard requires almost no maintenance. I'm pretty happy with how it looks now, a dozen years on, although I'm sure my standards are lower than most people's. We water about once a week in summer, not at all in winter. We get a good variety of bees, which is nice.
Ooh- I don't want xeriscaping, because I never water my lawn but ai am interested in making the property more climate resilient. We've had both warmer, wetter winters, wet cool summers and dry hot summers. We had to put in a drain pipe to channel overflow water. When I replace my driveway, I want to get something other than asphalt that drains better. At one point with all the downpours we had to put boom sock th8nsg to make sure that our garage didn't flood.
2/3 of the land not covered by the house/garage is woods, so we hire somebody to keep that managed, I.r. If we're worried that a tree is going to grow in a direction that will result in it falling on the house, we get it trimmed. They also trim the rhododendron. I'd really like to:figure out ways to landscape that are drought tolerant and allow me to channel water when there is too much rain. My neighbor did not move a log and picked up a bunch of leaves and twigs. The water flowed down from our property that a little swamp sprung up.
The original owners were from a family that worked in the nursery business in New Jersey, so their landscaping was pretty thoughtful and the actual amount of grass lawn is not large. There's a fair amount of pachysandra. I'd like to find some kind of grass alternative that the dog can run around on and is safe for her to eat that won't be hurt too much by downpours or mild drought.
Someone shot an airplane in Dallas. But I don't need to worry because that airport was at Love Field, where I was this summer, and not at DFW, where I'm going next week.
One of the fun things has been figuring out exactly the sunshine and microclimate of the yard. One corner gets partial afternoon shade from a large spruce, and it does the best. Everything under the overhang around the house is functionally a shade garden, so we can get away with columbines, except for the one corner that gets a bit more sun, where they fry. One area is too shaded by the feral rosebushes, and the rest of the yard just bakes, so I'm trying to find flowering plants that don't bleach.
Everything we've put in is xeric-friendly, but the one complication is that our soil is very heavy clay, which makes things a little more challenging. The deal was no new plants till 2025 after we have two seasons of what's doing well, and almost everything has and I'm hopeful that some of the plants that were slow to start this year will thrive next year after they get their roots sorted. And lots of what we put in naturally multiplies, so I'm hoping in a couple of years it's a little wild but very full.
We get lots of native bees and they are really cute. Bumblebees are the best. We get very fat ones with orange cummerbunds that weigh down the lavender in the manner of an old-timey cartoon tree catapult, and yes, they get smacked by the buds when they flit away.
My mom is xeriscaping her yard; she's one of the last people in the neighborhood to do it. I don't know the details though.
aw, jms' across-the-street neighbor, v sweet. I am also fond of the "jam many things in and whatever flourishes, we keep!" Though with some experience I realize it would be better to start pruning most of the flourishers before they're taller than I am.
People in Seattle keep putting in arid-ecosystem landscapes calling them xeriscaping and then are sulky/surprised when they aren't zero-maintenance in our NOT ARID climate. Often they've torn out actual native or close-to-native mature gardens, eg rhododendrons.
37: figuring out exactly the sunshine and microclimate of the yard.
A "feature" of having lived in the same house for nearly 40 years now is that the microclimate has shifted quite a bit (in some places several times). Mostly shade/vs. sun with increasing shade, but also some significant changes in water runoff and retention. Most of this is of course, directly or indirectly the result of stuff we've done (mostly trees, but also rain gardens and some leveling). And only about 10% of the original tree are still there. But there is a two 50-foot plus high trees that I planted -- a red oak and a tulip poplar.
Sorry for the belated response: this is all great and the bee stories are 100% feel-good content. Thank you! We've done some landscaping, planting, and so forth, but nothing at this scale, so it's great to have all this anecdata.
I don't like rhododendrons. To many have scratched me.
Lots of things have scratched me, but I'm really bad with plant names.
Some of my favorite things are scratchy.
My SSN ends in an odd number, so I guess I need to start saving more.
What did I miss? Saving more daylight?
I remember all the old people beating on Rostenkowski's car over their checks. I'm waiting for that to come back.
I'm watching the episode of Fleabag with Harrison Ford and I'm confused.
We just watched Jury Duty over two nights, and it was pretty descent. (I think mentioned here by others before?) But it just has made it seen for those two days like the whole national political scene is just that--an elaborate arranged farce but I am not in on the joke. Were that it were so.
Anyway, if someone has the idea that they are going to kick out immigrants and I'm going to work harder or longer to compensate, they are going to be disappointed.
The whole thing with RFK might unemploy me, but I'm not about to work harder to make up for that.
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Maldives, a famous holiday destination, is a small island state and an archipelago consisting of 26 atolls, that spreads around 800 kilometres vertically and 130 kilometres horizontally.Map, territory, whatever.
I think that as a matter of settled international law the Maldives extend only 100km vertically.
I never thought that there is possibility in impossible.
https://www.alienleads.com/scottsdale-seo-company
Nobody seems to have brought this up, but Haidt appears to have written up his conclusions before doing the research:
Australia donates its children to science:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australia-launches-landmark-bill-ban-social-media-children-under-16-2024-11-21/
They should have randomized the kids, banning only half of them.