Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• The Statistically Flawed Evidence That Social Media Is Causing the Teen Mental Health Crisis

  Jonathan Haidt's integrity and transparency are admirable, but the studies he's relying on aren't strong enough to support his conclusions.

  Taking a step back, there are strong reasons to distrust all observational studies looking for social associations. The literature has had many scandals-fabricated data, conscious or unconscious bias, and misrepresented findings.
  ...
  Haidt is promoting his findings as if they're akin to the relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer or lead exposure and IQ deficits. None of the studies he cites draw anything close to such a direct connection.

  Also see, What the evidence really says about social media's impact on teens' mental health.

  But in my view, the case for believing that smartphones are undermining teens' mental health is significantly weaker than Haidt suggests - yet stronger than his most ardent skeptics allow.

  • It's not clear that an international crisis of teen mental health even exists.
  • To say that Haidt's evidence for a global decline in teen mental health isn't conclusive is not to say that it's insignificant.
  • However, the empirical evidence linking social media to teen mental distress is much weaker than Haidt suggests.

• Twilight of the economists?

  The West's former top intellectuals grope for relevance in a fast-changing world.

  In practice, as the economist Paul Pfleiderer has noted, what happens with these thousands upon thousands of general equilibrium models is that they all go onto a musty old shelf somewhere - or whatever the modern digital equivalent is. Then, when an economist wants to support a certain policy, they simply search the musty old shelf for a model that reaches their desired conclusions, dust it off, and use it to back up their conclusion.

  Naturally, you can keep this up as long as politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and journalists keep listening to you each time. But this approach is going to end up getting things wrong a lot of the time, because the models that are being pulled off the shelf are not really disciplined by facts at all - they're just a mathed-up rationalization of whatever the (macroeconomist) already thinks. Eventually your advice will go bad enough times that politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and journalists will stop listening to you. Which, more or less, is what happened to macroeconomists after 2008.

• 96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers

  Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals - essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments - and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties.
  ...
  "In every study we've done, in any part of the health system, Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, is on nearly every page, including hospitals," Friedman observed.

• The Institute for Replication (I4R)

  The Institute for Replication (I4R) works to improve the credibility of science by systematically reproducing and replicating research findings in leading academic journals.

• What claims do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

  What would you like us to investigate? We're particularly interested in claims you have heard people making.

  It could be something you've heard said about a story in the news or seen circulating on social media that just doesn't feel right. Or it can simply be something you've always wanted to know the truth about.

• What's the best method for brushing your teeth?

  These bacteria and other microorganisms grow inside everyone's mouth, and form a claggy biofilm commonly known as dental plaque. It is made up of around 700 different species of bacteria, the second-greatest diversity in the human body after the gut, as well as a host of fungi and viruses. "They are living in the sticky film stuck to the teeth and also to the soft tissues," says Hirschfeld. "This sticky film can't be easily rinsed off - it really needs to be manually cleaned."

  The most important place to remove it from is not in fact the teeth, but the gumline. This is where microbes are best able to infiltrate the gum tissue and cause inflammation, and eventually conditions such as periodontitis. In fact, "brushing your teeth" is something of a misnomer. "Think of brushing your gumline, rather than the teeth themselves," says Hirschfeld. "The teeth will then be brushed automatically."