The OP says that turned out fine even though he played an online video game for thousands of hours, and mentions he made friends to boot. He goes on to repeat this idea of "online connections". But screen time for young people (and old) today is not necessarily that; many of them are just consuming content from endless feeds and not building actual ties with other people. Modern social media is not a place for new friendships to blossom.

Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.

> Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.

Or maybe you are one person and one person is never a big enough data set.

> If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

Would we? A consistent trend is a consistent trend and "rewiring" doesn't necessarily mean all metrics need to go downward.

The entire article is "trust me bro, I used to be addicted, but now I have a PhD."

I mean, come on.

First claim in the article:

> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.

Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."

Another claim from the article:

> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.

I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.

>Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

All of these, with the exception of fewer high school dropouts, are examples of people doing less. Going outside less, doing less mischief, socializing less. The reason for that is almost certainly that phone use is monopolizing more and more time of their time and crowding out theseother activities. I would absolutely concede that access to phones is not an unequivocal ill, there are some positive upsides. But these supposed counterexamples I think are exactly what we would expect if phones were changing the behavior of children.

And, on the subject of high school dropouts, I think there’s at least some reason to think this is due to a declining set of standards. This probably varies by state and school district, but there has certainly been a movement to reduce the number of infractions that leads to expulsion, and outbursts that would previously have resulted in student punishment are now allowed to continue unabated in some jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s pivotal to the argument one way or the other though.

Finally, I take the author’s point that the causal relationship between screen time and poor mental health runs two ways. But isn’t the prevalence of mental disorder and social isolation increasing? I would be curious to know what the author thinks is behind that broader background trend, if not the phones.

If one's mind has been "destroyed", would you know?

It's hard to imagine that the past problems he listed were not at least partially due to his excessive device use.

We don't have great emperical evidence to point to a specific thing between screen time, social media, gambling, counter culture etc on the causes of the reverse Flynn effect and mental health epidemic in general, but we do know that anecdotal evidence does not improve our data one way or the other.

Adam Omary is a research scholar for the libertarian-leaning Cato institute [0].

While centering individual responsibility and calling out the weird dynamic where people unnecessarily embrace a personal narrative previously associated with debilitating conditions to feel a sense of belonging is refreshing, this is a heavy lift.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/people/adam-omary

Wow. I could not disagree more with this author, but I was looking for any evidence he could offer other than his credentials (he's from Harvard and 26) and being part of the Generation that author Jonathan Haidt of, "The Anxious Generation" indicated was struggling the most with screens and social media.

I was part of an in-between generation (originally tail end of Gen X) and raised as a latchkey kid. It was the early 90s and thankfully I was able to travel without parents at 12 on airplanes very effortlessly. This allowed me to get out of my midwest (Wisconsin) bubble and meet in SF every year around New Years for MacWorld and SF2600 gatherings. It was a magical time. I'm not at all against communicating online and meeting people there, but social media as controlled by a singleton (e.g. Meta, Weixin, Weibo, Twitter/X, etc) seems awful. Sometimes I miss the fun of IRC (Dalnet and others), BBSes, and even AOL Chatrooms. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so many people have adopted Facebook for small business and rural communities in the US rather than having a website they control. I can't find out what specials are happening at my local restaurant (Ember) or my favorite food truck (Chairman Bao & Eat on Monday) without having an Instagram account. I still resist Meta.

This author misses the point that some parents value critical thinking and independence. Not everyone joined the greek system in college! Same for social media, not everyone needs to be "connected" in social media before age 16. The algorithms at these singletons, often end up restricting and narrowing the world for many young minds (echo chambers for their cohort). It's not about censorship, but a little guidance and oversight reviewing social media from a 20,000 foot level rather than in the weeds.

I fully expected this author to talk about the importance of computing access for education and development, but it seemed to just be about arguing for this hot mess we have now. Yikes!