Two Minds Blog

  Jonathan Haidt's book  The Anxious Generation  made a big splash in education circles last year. It elaborates the thesis that social media is harming people's mental health, especially that of teenagers and young adults. Haidt has compiled  a lot of different evidence  that he says supports this conclusion, but some of his academic colleagues aren't buying it.    To briefly summarize Haidt’s position, there is strong correlational evidence based on two co-occurring trends: The specific timeframe from 2010-2015 showed a dramatic emergency of new mental health problems on a wide range of measures for teenagers, especially younger adolescents ages 10-14. At the same time, smartphones made social media apps continuously available to people in this age bracket. Haidt argues that it was the specific combination of social media apps and the internet in one’s pocket that made the situation so harmful, which helps him to explain why this specific 5-year peri...

Image of protest against the 1918 Sedition Act during World War I. That act was repealed in 1920. Many concerning things have happened in the United States over the past month, but the one I'd like to write about today is an effort to win arguments by redefining terms. In a recent article titled "In Trump's Washington, Words Become Weaponized," the New York Times  presents a variety of examples in which the White House's recent Executive Orders use terms in ways that are unusual, or in some cases literally opposite from the term's plain-language meaning. Here are some notable instances (if you're up on all the news, you can skip to the part after the bullets, but I do like to document my sources): The term "DEI" (for  diversity, equity, and inclusion ) was used as a pejorative in President Trump's press conference after a January 30 airplane crash, in which he said that "we need to have our smartest people" as air traffic controll...