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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.




  • I never said, nor implied, either side were “dumb” or “barbarians”.

    Your stance implies it, in many ways. You’re not really trying to understand the people there, and treat them in a completely dehumanising manner.

    Like, do I have to explain why it’s not a good idea to take most goods and history away from a nation and dump it somewhere near the polar circle?

    Do I have to remind you of that other guy who thought a fabricated cultural conflict could be solved by moving the Jews away to Madagascar?

    the populace of both sides are brainwashed by organized religion, and authoritarians and terrorists are using that as a cudgel to achieve their own selfish aims, and are the real poison here.

    The only way to take away their power is to remove the dispute over the region.

    Since you’re already proposing completely impossible fantasy solutions, why didn’t you propose e.g. deposing of those authoritarians and religious extremists who fan the fires of conflict, assembling representatives willing to work out a tolerable solution to the conflict, and thus allowing the area (especially Palestine) to gradually develop, and naturally ease and dispose of the extremist culture that most people there are born into?

    No, that sounds boring, let’s just take everyone, terrorists and normal people together, and dump them into the Amazon rainforest or Tierra del fuego. Even in your fantasies you don’t seem to wish for especially nice things for those people.