Throughput: The Kids Are All Right but the Surgeon General Isn’t Edition

Graphic by Today Testing (For derivative), CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

[ThTh1] This week, the US Surgeon General called for warning labels on social media websites. The ostensible reason is that social media is driving a huge mental health crisis among teens and they should be kept away from such sites.

Murthy’s assertions notwithstanding, there is actually little convincing evidence for his claim. The main evidence cited is timing. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. Over the last 15 year or so, we’ve seen a sharp rise in teens reporting symptoms of anxiety and ER visits for suicide attempts and self-harm. But part of that rise is due to how we are measuring mental health. Furthermore, there is massive variation in country-to-country data with some countries showing high levels of social media use and low suicide/depression rates and some showing the opposite. The data on this are, at best, mixed and anecdotal and remind one a great deal of previous moral panics over video games supposedly driving teen violence or pornography supposedly driving sexual violence.¹

It’s also worth noting that the biggest spike in anxiety and depression has happened since the pandemic. The pandemic severed a lot of social ties and networks. Moreover, we continue to underestimate how much of a global trauma we went through. Put aside “lockdowns” and remote schooling and all that stuff — a pandemic is stressful. People get sick and dying is stressful. We have just experienced a generational trauma and everyone is trying to shrug it off as though millions of deaths and tens of millions of hospitalizations weren’t a burden on our collective psyche.

But I’m also somewhat sympathetic to Kevin Drum’s view:

I’m not even sure there’s been much of an increase in teen anxiety and stress—different surveys produce different results. But to the extent there has been, my sense is that it’s more likely due to how we raise our kids. By insisting on keeping adult eyes on them at all times, we transmit a sense of ever-present danger and fear. By organizing their every activity, they never learn to do things for themselves. By overprotecting them, they never learn how to solve touchy problems on their own. Is it any wonder that by adolescence, when they have a natural desire to break free of parental control, they might be more nervous about it than previous generations? And don’t even get me started on active shooter drills in schools.

As Greg Lukianoff likes to point out, we are subjecting a generation of children to a sort of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT, a method I have used to get my own anxiety under control, is a broad sweep of psychological methodology but the TL;DR version is that you identify distorted thinking; ways you are making yourself anxious and depressed when you don’t need to be. An example I often am prone to is mind-reading: assuming that if someone, for example, doesn’t respond to a text, it’s because they are angry at me or don’t like me or are offended. But, in reality, I have no way of knowing what they are actually thinking; I’m pretending I can read their mind and assuming the worst. CBT helps people identify those kinds of “cognitive distortions” that make them more anxious and depressed about the world than they need to be.

But this is the opposite of what we are doing with teenagers these days. Crime rates are low and a child is never safer than when they are in school. Yet we tell them they are in constant danger of getting gunned down and subject them to traumatizing cosplay “live shooter drills”. The environment is cleaner now than it has been for over a century; yet we tell kids that global warming is going to destroy the world and they shouldn’t bother to have kids of their own. The nation’s economy is strong; yet we tell them they’re on the brink of poverty. Every shift in the Ukraine War is supposedly a precursor to World War III. Every economic hiccup supposedly presages a recession. Every flu bug is the next COVID. We are constantly, incessantly terrifying younger generations with various boogeymen. And then we’re surprised they’re anxious.

It’s not that problems don’t exist; global warming, for example, is all too real. But most of the problems we face today are solvable problems and relatively manageable compared to the calamities previous generations endured like smallpox epidemics, world wars and decades-long global depressions. Maybe I’m a bit of a pollyanna on this since most of the young people I deal with are college students. But I don’t actually worry too much about young people; they show every sign of being able to rise to the challenges that our remaining problems present.

My point here is that it’s easy to identify a menace like “social media” and decide that is the main problem facing kids. And, to be honest, I am not opposed to banning or restricting phone use in schools and think age minimums on social media are appropriate. But I think the people clamoring about the perils of social media — itself yet another moral panic designed to terrify younger generations — need to take a long hard look in the mirror. It is our responsibility to build a world where children feel safe but challenged. We aren’t doing that because there’s money and fame to be made in sowing panic and terror over crime, immigration, global warming or whatever. To the extent that social media is a problem, it is because they amplify efforts to instill young people with a constant sense of dread.

Maybe knock that crap off. Then we’ll talk about Instagram.

[ThTh2] The NYT has yet another piece flogging lab leak theories for the origin of COVID-19. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, author of one of the most important papers on the origin of COVID-19, responds here.

In the end, nothing has changed since the last time we talked about this. The case for a zoonotic origin relies on a lot of pieces of data, including the pattern of the initial spread. The case for lab leak origin still consists of crying “Wuhan Institute” and frantically waving the arms. The lab leak theory still relies on the idea that WIV did research that was never funded, was going to be done in the United States and used COVID strains that are very different from the SARS-CoV-2 strain that created the pandemic. That the scientists identified mutations in the furin cleavage site as a point of major concern is no more suspicious than Billy Mitchell identifying Pearl Harbor as a point of vulnerability decades before the Japanese attack. If a SARS variant was going to cause a global pandemic, that was where the mutation was going to happen.

In the end, the lab leak theory has less to do with science than it does with politics. People still want a boogeyman to blame and especially a domestic boogeyman like the NIH and Anthony Fauci. And the truth is that we may never pin down the origin of COVID-19 with precision, even if China were cooperating. We should continue to investigate but these occasional regurgitations of 2020 talking points are … not that.

[ThTh3] I still think that most of the supposed “AI” apps are just plagiarism machines.

[ThTh4] One of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of the existence of dark matter is the rotation curve of galaxies. To put it simply, when we look at other galaxies, we see they are rotating too fast. They would fly apart if the only thing holding them together were the visible matter, thus the existence of dark matter. A new result shows that these rotation curves extend out a million light years out from the galaxy centers, implying either that their dark matter halos are much larger than previously thought or that something else is going on, such as alternative physics.

I remain skeptical of alternative physics for reasons I’ve highlighted before. But this is an interesting result and I’m curious to see what comes out of it.

[ThTh5] One of the things I worry about is drug-resistance bacteria. Here are some details on a new antibiotic that not only kills bacteria but spares the gut microbiome.

[ThTh6] The brain is amazing.

An astonishing new brain image captures the neurons and synapses in the brain in unprecedented detail. The image covers just 1 cubic millimeter of human brain — but it contains 1.4 Petabytes of data. https://t.co/2TXSRtmS9o pic.twitter.com/GkIZBBwibT

— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) June 12, 2024

[ThTh7] The Solar System may have plowed through a dust cloud two million years ago. This would have altered our climate and may explain the state of my kids’ bathroom.

[ThTh8] The authors of one of the most critical and cited papers in the field of Alzheimer’s research have admitted they faked their results. The damage this has done to our efforts to tackle one of the cruelest disease out there is incalculable. There should be consequences.

[ThTh9] Some human experiences are universal:

One of my favorite bits of science revealing the universality of the human condition is a pair of fossilized footprints in White Sands, NM, that appear to show a toddler walking with an adult, then getting picked up, then put down, then picked up, then put down, on and on. https://t.co/1bqn60R07s

— Monica Baumann 🇺🇦 (@MonicaBaumann) June 3, 2024

[ThTh10] A new blood test may prove very adept at predicting the return of breast cancer. And a new treatment is showing stunning results for a particular kind of lung cancer.

{ThTh11] One of the best examples of “burying the lede” I’ve ever seen. The headline says fathers have worse cardiovascular health compared to non-fathers. You have to get deep into the article before you find that dads have better overall health and live longer.

1. Even most of the porn grabbers have admitted there is no evidence of a connection between porn and sexual violence. Sexual violence has plunged over the last 30 years while porn availability has surged. They’ve now fallen back on equally mythical boogeyman like `porn addiction’ to justify their busybodyness.