As a dedicated STOE guy, I know that true monocausality is unlikely, and therefore I appreciate this effort to complicate the most blunt version of the STOE. One point missing from this piece, however, is the concept of network effects and society-wide displacement, as opposed to individual use. We can run a study on what happens when a bunch of individuals turn off Facebook for a couple months, but those individuals still live in a community dominated by Facebook. We can't run a study to see what happens when an entire community shuts off Facebook for a few months or years. For example, the concept of displacement is prominent in this piece, but only analyzed on a personal level, as a personal tradeoff between phone time versus socializing, sleeping, and so forth. That analysis overlooks how displacement is equally important at the community level. It's plausible that the rise of the smartphone in tandem with social media killed local newspapers. Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed. So yes, we can't blame every bad thing in life on "the phones," but I'm still comfortable concluding that "the phones" are unambiguously bad for us, on net.
“The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it’s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what’s going on in the world.”
Gulp. I’ve never used Facebook. I’ve only been reading The New York Times, The Washington Post (but no longer), The Atlantic, BBC News, Reason, and several Substacks, along with watching TV newscasts and discussion programs. Is there a more real world that’s accessible only through Facebook?
In addition to Allan SB's really important point, this essay (and every other one like it) fails to grapple with the actual reason people believe the STOE. It's because we see it in ourselves about our own relationship with our phones. No RCT is going to convince me that I read as many books as I did 20 years ago, or that checking my phone first thing when I wake up is healthy.
I like smart phones and am skeptical of the damage. But I will say - most people do not need national news at all. It just doesnt affect their lives. Especially if they are getting their news in the form of emotional short form video vs text.
The evidence *for* the harms of smartphones comes from randomized trials. The evidence *against* is observations of social trends in non-Anglophone countries. That seems kind of weak, no? Maybe happiness would be rising still faster in Eastern Europe without smartphones. If we want to say phone harms are specific to English-speaking countries, we need some equivalent randomized trials in other countries.
I also found the case against phones negatively affecting politics very... social sciencey. Failing to observe a shift in one measure (affective polarization) in a short experiment doesn't really speak to the internet theory of political decline. Affective polarization is mostly a US phenomenon, but populism and fascism are rising in the US, Europe, South America, and India. The ways in which social media might drive these trends aren't amenable to short randomized experiments the way individual well-being is.
Sometimes in an argument, one side is basically just correct. Yes, unquestionably phones have some benefits. Cigarettes do too.
Neil Postman coined the term "information action ratio" to talk about how a lot of the information we receive now has little bearing on our actual lives and how much we can actually act on it. He wrote this in the 80s, and I think the smartphone is just an accelerant.
You cite several studies where people are less informed after their smartphone usage drops, but if i'm being honest i don't know if being "informed" is really helpful for the average person. It is also hard to determine any change in political persuasion when someone only does it for a month or two. They have been consuming information their whole lives, and it takes a longer time to undo that. These days it is often culture war stuff, and this study has shown that that's accelerated since the 80s: https://sites.harvard.edu/aakaash-rao/job-market-paper/
Finally, the fact that this only really shows up in Anglosphere countries is interesting. I wonder if it's partly because we were already relatively developed in the mid century. A lot of things people are upset about are in america boil down to "i can't live on a single factory income, own a home, and send my kids to college like they used to in the 50s". Readers of The Argument know the flaw in this line of thinking. But other countries don't necessarily have a similar Golden Age to harken back to.
In America, I think if the Smartphone Theory of Everything folks link up with the Cars (or Housing) Theory of Everything people we will start to have a good time.
As a dedicated STOE guy, I know that true monocausality is unlikely, and therefore I appreciate this effort to complicate the most blunt version of the STOE. One point missing from this piece, however, is the concept of network effects and society-wide displacement, as opposed to individual use. We can run a study on what happens when a bunch of individuals turn off Facebook for a couple months, but those individuals still live in a community dominated by Facebook. We can't run a study to see what happens when an entire community shuts off Facebook for a few months or years. For example, the concept of displacement is prominent in this piece, but only analyzed on a personal level, as a personal tradeoff between phone time versus socializing, sleeping, and so forth. That analysis overlooks how displacement is equally important at the community level. It's plausible that the rise of the smartphone in tandem with social media killed local newspapers. Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed. So yes, we can't blame every bad thing in life on "the phones," but I'm still comfortable concluding that "the phones" are unambiguously bad for us, on net.
“The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it’s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what’s going on in the world.”
Gulp. I’ve never used Facebook. I’ve only been reading The New York Times, The Washington Post (but no longer), The Atlantic, BBC News, Reason, and several Substacks, along with watching TV newscasts and discussion programs. Is there a more real world that’s accessible only through Facebook?
In addition to Allan SB's really important point, this essay (and every other one like it) fails to grapple with the actual reason people believe the STOE. It's because we see it in ourselves about our own relationship with our phones. No RCT is going to convince me that I read as many books as I did 20 years ago, or that checking my phone first thing when I wake up is healthy.
The meme about Instagram, body image, and teenage girls should never be referenced without this context: https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-instagrams-effect-on-teenage-girls/
Thank you for sharing this, I have never seen the og data
I like smart phones and am skeptical of the damage. But I will say - most people do not need national news at all. It just doesnt affect their lives. Especially if they are getting their news in the form of emotional short form video vs text.
The evidence *for* the harms of smartphones comes from randomized trials. The evidence *against* is observations of social trends in non-Anglophone countries. That seems kind of weak, no? Maybe happiness would be rising still faster in Eastern Europe without smartphones. If we want to say phone harms are specific to English-speaking countries, we need some equivalent randomized trials in other countries.
I also found the case against phones negatively affecting politics very... social sciencey. Failing to observe a shift in one measure (affective polarization) in a short experiment doesn't really speak to the internet theory of political decline. Affective polarization is mostly a US phenomenon, but populism and fascism are rising in the US, Europe, South America, and India. The ways in which social media might drive these trends aren't amenable to short randomized experiments the way individual well-being is.
Sometimes in an argument, one side is basically just correct. Yes, unquestionably phones have some benefits. Cigarettes do too.
Neil Postman coined the term "information action ratio" to talk about how a lot of the information we receive now has little bearing on our actual lives and how much we can actually act on it. He wrote this in the 80s, and I think the smartphone is just an accelerant.
You cite several studies where people are less informed after their smartphone usage drops, but if i'm being honest i don't know if being "informed" is really helpful for the average person. It is also hard to determine any change in political persuasion when someone only does it for a month or two. They have been consuming information their whole lives, and it takes a longer time to undo that. These days it is often culture war stuff, and this study has shown that that's accelerated since the 80s: https://sites.harvard.edu/aakaash-rao/job-market-paper/
Finally, the fact that this only really shows up in Anglosphere countries is interesting. I wonder if it's partly because we were already relatively developed in the mid century. A lot of things people are upset about are in america boil down to "i can't live on a single factory income, own a home, and send my kids to college like they used to in the 50s". Readers of The Argument know the flaw in this line of thinking. But other countries don't necessarily have a similar Golden Age to harken back to.
In America, I think if the Smartphone Theory of Everything folks link up with the Cars (or Housing) Theory of Everything people we will start to have a good time.
My "smartphone theory of everything" is that absorbing too much bad internet prose results in never learning the logic of building a sustained argument, via paragraphs. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-god-learn-to-paragraph