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Except that the entire point of the debate is that things have allegedly gotten worse over time, and it is the core argument of at least one of them that this can be mapped directly to adoption of smartphones. There can be multiple structural factors, but part of the debate is precisely over degrees of damage. Haidt doesn't have a monocausal explanation, he just weighs one cause more heavily.
Obviously, Playboy mags could be accused of objectification and "corrupting the youth" but that doesn't mean that on-demand UHD porn with algorithms feeding you more and more radical stuff is equally corrosive.
I don't think so either - but then, I'm a pessimist about political action in general. But that doesn't mean that they're actually wrong when they diagnose or blame something for the worsening situation.
What part of the debate is aimed at modifying the environment of the outgroup to suit the ingroup? Is social media coded as the outgroup here? I really don't understand.
How is that an exception to what I said? My point was that such a debate is contrived, obfuscatory and self serving. The more control a person has over their environment, the more powerful they can make their feedback loop. The mechanism for how they do that is irrelevant to that point. Limiting the scope of the debate to specific groups or mechanisms only serves to obfuscate the veracity of the problem.
The reason I said that liberal science men and rational free thinkers are not in a position to do anything about that is not because of their real world political power or influence. It's because they are at their core liberals who at every turn have fought for people to have more control over their environments. And that's the elephant in the room. Because the problem isn't specific mechanisms. It's people. When you give people control over their environments they will mold it to form feedback loops.
If one is a liberal, free thinking, open minded, live and let live kinda guy one is probably not going to have a big overarching vision about what kind of lives other people should live. No higher power to live up to, no universal or group specific ideal to strive for. In essence: no strictly enforced social norms that can infringe upon thy freedom. Such a person is probably more inclined to just say: 'as long as it's not hurting anyone and everyone consents'. The problem with that is that people are almost guaranteed to destroy themselves when they happen upon a stimuli they enjoy too much. We have been witnessing that for decades now. All under the noses of the liberal free thinkers who did nothing about it since the world around them happened to suit their predilections and preferences for an 'open and free society'. As well meaning as they may think themselves to be, they are simply put not equipped to deal with the problem in its totality. Their failure now surrounds us all.
Another issue I take with people like Haidt and the like broaching the topic the way they do is that it is inherently self serving. I mean, what a coincidence that the guy who doesn't like 'woke' politics is talking about how 'woke' women are mentally ill. Sorry, but I put about as much stock in the sincerity of the endeavor as when progressive science men create studies about how stupid racists are. To say nothing about the truth value of those claims, nor the actual sincerity of those involved. There are just too many arrows pointing in one direction, for a lack of a better explanation.
And to that end, if the people that are going on this navel probing expedition into the problems of progressive women are actually serious about solutions to the problems afflicting them, for instance by removing smartphones, then I'd expect them to be able to muster up many times the enthusiasm and effort for the host of issues of the same variety that are afflicting the majority of the western world today. But because of who they are, I hold no hope that they will. So I find their presence here as irrelevant and futile and the topic of their discussion as particularly self serving and gross. Not only because of the inherently otherizing nature of the endeavor but because it obfuscates the actual problem, which their liberal ideals helped maintain.
Ah, my misread. Sorry. I have less to quarrel with in this.
This I'm not particularly sympathetic to.
But then, I think we have very different views of the "people like Haidt" category. For one: he's pretty liberal himself (he is a social scientist, I mean...). These are his people, to be set right. For another: this topic is actually in line with his previous publishing. He's not just overreaching to own the wokes as some might be accused.
But I guess I'm just more optimistic about his motives. I've heard him beating the drum on the rising mental illness in young girls for years now - without emphasizing the woke element (he distrusts smartphones for kids and really hammers on limiting that as a solution, not merely "owning wokeness").
YMMV.
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