The surgeon general may be wrong - Issue #336

Last week, our Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory on social media and mental health for the young. He referenced that there are 'ample indicators' that social media potentially harms mental health and well-being, especially among children and adolescents.

Here's the bottom line, from Dr. Murthy:

The most common question parents ask me is, ‘is social media safe for my kids’. The answer is that we don't have enough evidence to say it's safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people's mental health.

If you've been hanging around this weekly email for long enough, then you know I like almost nothing more than nervous hand-wringing over technology. This has gotten me in trouble: 2020's scandals related to political tech turned out to be little more than the smoke and mirrors of Elizabeth Holmes-esque tech sales tactics. But I've linked to enough of Jonathan Haidt and similar work for you to know where I stand on the surgeon general's new conventional wisdom: I don't think social media is good. In my curmudgeonly view, the goodness of your life could be measured by just how far you manage to get from social media and screens.

Now, this opinion may be right. It may be even shared by the surgeon general. But that doesn't mean it's properly and scientifically evidenced.

Here's another thing this weekly email likes: skeptics who look for clothing on the emperor and point out when it's not there. For this week's reading, I have a pretty good one along this line. The author looks through the studies assembled by the anti-social media people and finds a lot of errors. The evidence may be mounting, but this review shows that it's more likely that the researchers decided to start supporting this conclusion. Beware of one error in the piece: our man assumes the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The better verdict would be not yet proven rather than proven false. Even so, it's worth reading and it's worth keeping a healthy skepticism of new studies that prove exactly what the authors set out to find.

Reading