BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.
old profile: /u/antonim@lemmy.world
BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.
To add to my other comment, I noticed I failed to address this earlier comment of yours: https://kbin.social/m/science@lemmy.ml/t/954121/-/comment/6137667
Here you do exactly what Haidt criticises, IMO entirely correctly - focusing only and exclusively on the situation in the USA. Which absolutely looks narrow and reductonist.
I’m not downplaying its existence but its wider social effects. If a society of two thousand people is racist against two members of that society, that is not likely to affect the mental health of dozens of members of the society - at most only those two who are the direct victims and those who are close to them.
What are some of those assumptions? Maybe it is reductionist, but I haven’t seen you or the Nature article present a more nuanced approach (or an approach at all). And personally this isn’t a topic that I find myself emotionally very invested in, and I’m far from an expert on sociology, so I really would be interested in learning about better approaches. Do your and the Nature article make fewer assumptions for your framing to work?
Haidt articulated his points and methods very clearly and you shifted away from them without any explanation, as far as I can see. This isn’t just disagreement within the conversation, but a disagreement on what the discussion is supposed to be about. Only now have you actually addressed what is an essental part of Haidt’s argumentation, but still very vaguely.
As opposed to ignoring a whole sentence that I wrote in order to make me come off as if I deny the existence of racism?
You’re ignoring the fact I wrote “which is not to say that those areas can’t be or aren’t quite racist”. The racism, no matter how heinous, if it can only affect a smaller percentage of the population, or those who aren’t even the citizens of the country (as it happens with migrants from the Middle East and north Africa), cannot have much to do with the mental illnesses of European teenagers accross all social and ethnic groups.
I do not get the impression you’re even trying to argue against my or Haidt’s position at this point, you’ve simply waved away all the arguments he has brought up, and now are ignoring entire sentences from my comments.
You’ve forgotten what we’re talking about in the first place. To explain the rise in mental illnesses, you have to find what changed in people’s environment that could affect the health situation. If nothing in the environment has changed, the expected result would be that there would be no change in the outcomes either. If the discrimination has been roughly the same for the last few decades, why would it suddenly start resulting in different rates of mental illnesses?
other forms of othering often around socioeconomic standing or even one’s ancestors or even their ancestors’ jobs
Ok but none of that is new, it is not relevant here.
Racial discrimination - depends on the region. Much of Europe is still fairly homogenous, thus the racism there cannot be statistically as harmful as in the US (which is not to say that those areas can’t be or aren’t quite racist). And yet I don’t believe those areas are exempt from the general trend with mental illnesses, as I see at least in my own country. And even in the more heterogenous areas this probably barely begins to account for the trend, the illnesses are not confined to the discriminated populations.
Sexual discrimination is what I include under things that are “at worst, not increasing”. If it’s not rising , it doesn’t explain the rise in mental illnesses.
In the end, out of four proposed causes two are clearly irrelevant, and two can account for the trend only partially at most.
with the rise of right-wing parties
IMO many of these parties are also symptoms of phone and internet overuse too. Much of the ideas, values and language of many new European right-wing parties is clearly imported from online American conservative discourse, without regard for the reality of local society. In my country where gender transitions are very difficult to undergo, where non-binary people simply do not exist in the public sphere at all, new right-wing parties will still talk about the nefarious “gender ideology”, declaring there can be only two genders, etc. This is literal Internet-induced delusion.
His second point in his rebuttal is particularly eyebrow raising.
Do you mean this one?
Odgers’ alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.
Because that’s obviously correct. I don’t know where you live, but I live in continental Europe, where issues such as “opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence” simply do not exist or are, at worst, not increasing. (One exception might be a very specific variant of opioids, which is gambling. Edit: Besides, gambling is also heavily promoted online, made easier to access, even packaged into video games, so it’s just a further problem for defending phone-/internet-centric teenage culture.) They also frequently have little to do with how young people feel, think and live in general even in US, as far as I see from the stuff (conversations, media) that I see online. Projecting these very specific issues onto all young people all across the world looks like nothing more than American defaultism.
I’ve read both the review and the response, and I find the response more convincing, supported by much more explicit data and clear arguments.
Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.
It’s going to take a million trouser legs to get some things back on track…
Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough
We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.
Yeah, I’ll shill for dbzer0 as the place to host the community.
In Croatia, we call(ed) it ‘snow’ (snijeg).
I’m in exactly this situation right now and I’m becoming more than desperate. I probably have several emails asking me to respond and let people know what’s going on. I don’t even dare to open my inbox.
Clearly you can see it’s an old picture, from the ages when people actually drew/photoshopped new things, before memes were 100% made up of Drake and Wojak variations.
/boomerposting
A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…
I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)
I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.