Healthy evidentiary arguments

I have been seeing a lot of noise about the need to ban Tik-Tok and increasing objections to social media.  In neither case am I seeing strong or robust evidence to the claimed negative impact.  Perhaps it is real but I sure would like to see something more solid than has been advanced so far.

Fortunately Stuart Ritchie steps into the breach.  You can't trust any analyst blindly but I advance a lot of confidence in Ritchie's work.  My default assumption, based on past experience, is that he is correct until proven otherwise.  For many or most otherwise, my default assumption is the reverse.  Assume that they are incorrect until proven otherwise.

From Don’t panic about social media harming your child’s mental health – the evidence is weak by Stuart Ritchie.  The subheading is ANALYSIS We’re told the internet destroys children’s mental health – but Stuart Ritchie read all the relevant studies and saw little to support the claim.  

And here’s the thing: when the authors of the “Facebook arrival” study raised their standards in this way, running a correction for multiple comparisons, all the results they found for well-being were no longer statistically significant. That is, a somewhat more conservative way of looking at the data indicated that every result they found was statistically indistinguishable from a scenario where Facebook had no effect on well-being whatsoever.

Now let’s turn to the second study, which was a randomised controlled trial where 1,637 adults were randomly assigned to shut down their Facebook account for four weeks, or go on using it as normal. Let’s call it the “deactivating Facebook” study. This “famous” study has been described as “the most impressive by far” in this area, and was the only study cited in the Financial Times as an example of the “growing body of research showing that reducing time on social media improves mental health”.

The bottom-line result was that leaving Facebook for a month led to higher well-being, as measured on a questionnaire at the end of the month. But again, looking in a bit more detail raises some important questions.

But it's not that straightforward.  I am also an admirer of Jonathan Haidt.  Not because his work is particularly rigorous but because it is insightful.  He is in the opposite camp of Ritchie.  From Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence by Jon Haidt.  The subheading is Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational.  

Haidt's argument is plausible and Ritchie's rigorous skepticism is warranted.  

We just don't know.  Yet.