Will data ruin us?



I got this from the excellent marginal revolution on teen suicide and screen use.


I cannot believe we are studying teen suicide based on teen self reports of screen time. You think teens reliably know their screen usage? Looks like the whole field has been using self report, and the correlation is only 0.2! (Meaning people are almost no better than chance at accurately reporting screen time.)

Anyway, the best part of the teen study is that they recommend against 1-5 hours per day as really dangerous. Even though of the kids who attempted, over half had less use and some had zero. So, you could just as easily say that heavy screen time was protective. 

A shocking number of times, data seems to add fuel to bad thinking, rather than the opposite. Maybe it won't be fire or nukes that proves to be the technology that humans can't handle responsibly and ruins us, it'll just be data. 

Theoretical Future Alien Anthropology entry on humans:
"Despite its clear benefits and potential, some humans enabled themselves to convince others of bad ideas using data, and civilization eventually collapsed from measles and something called 'the paleo diet."

It's plausible. Maybe religion and myth and tribalism are actually more sustainable ways to manage human affairs?


Side note:
Unsettling how many high quality images there are with open access usage rights for apocalypse. Are there more doomsday peddlers than I thought?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Better Way to Interpret "Screen Time"

When I first saw this study, I tried to develop ways to hide my phone from myself: " The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power " But Lulie Tanett flipped this around on me. Study finds that people prefer to do other things with their time than complete boring tasks: https://t.co/i8EQmuDLcc — Lulie (@reasonisfun) July 16, 2019 Of course! Of course it's hard to do boring tasks with the option of something more interesting nearby. The lesson, according to Lulie, is that we should be focusing on not forcing ourselves to do boring stuff. As she articulates here , relying on self discipline to force oneself to complete boring tasks is a failure, not a virtue. It is a failure to recognize why the task is valuable, which makes it fun. To do boring stuff is to be confused. This informs the entire discussion about "screen time." We should stop thinking about screens as stealing our attention away from what matters, and instead think about sc...
Read more

Points on Popper - problems over definitions

Image
A recent conversation with my friend Michael illustrates the point: We had been talking about art and creativity and the like, and at some point he blurted out at me to "go and make some art." I challenged him on the definition of art by claiming that I do creative things all the time. Thus ensued a back and forth about definitions, what counts as artisinal versus functional, what theories of art are important. When Michael suggested we learn about Bauhaus to see if it can shed light on our discussion, I suddenly grasped the relevance of Karl Popper. Popper hated quibbling about definitions, claiming an inverse relationship between the amount of jargon in a field and the information content within it. Practitioners wind up endlessly debating semantics and take their eye off knowledge creation. For Popper, knowledge creation comes from finding and addressing problems. What is wrong about the world? What doesn't make sense? What two ideas or explanations contrad...
Read more

Why "No" is Good for Children

The word "no" has a bad reputation in parenting - Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner even recommends ways to avoid it . The charge is that the word can be used up 400 times per day, eventually causing children to overreact to it by flying into a tantrum, or otherwise ignore it altogether. But the Popperian style of parenting not only loosens restrictions on using the word, it sees "no" as a crucial word in children's development. To see why, we need to take a pretty large step back and consider the purpose of parenting.  For Popperians, the job of the parent is to help the child understand the world. By developing explanations for how the world works, including how the child's own mind and psychology works, the child becomes a healthy adult. Interestingly, this process doesn't stop in adulthood, because no explanation is ever known to be the final, best explanation. In fact, adulthood is an arbitrary designation that has more to do with cultural...
Read more