[cpsempek]

I commented this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating because actually reading the author's arguments (granted, in other writings, not OP) will allow you to see he's considered this point and is will to accept that causation works the other way around.

It's a fair point. But what explains the uptick in depression and mental health issues starting around 2012, disproportionately impacting pre-teen girls and not contained to any geo. The author's entire point is that social media is the only explanation that that has been proposed [1]. Moreover, it's not a far-fetched explanation. He very aware that correlation does not provide causation, and that it could be the other way around. However, no one (according to him) has offered up a theory which explains the data like the social media theory does.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[cauch]

And these arguments have been heard, but they are still not convincing.

I don't know what is the reality, maybe indeed the smartphone is causing the problem. But the author is just jumping to the conclusion without proper scientifically caution.

There are a lot of other hypothesis that explain exactly the same observations, and that are not far-fetched (as you say, there is none _according to the author_, who then list all of these hypotheses in his rebutal). In his article, he goes through a lot of them but don't address them properly. For example, the more recent social anxiety about climate change is just "I don't think so".

Personally, if I have to bet, I think it is social media. But then, 1) I will not claim "it is social media", just "it may be social media", 2) it would be stupid of me to then isolate smartphone: if it is social media, then forbidding smartphone but not the laptops would be totally useless (and if the argument is turned into "no but the problem is the constant usage all the time, which you cannot do with a laptop", then, again, it's just pure conjecture: it may end up being true, but it is still scientifically incorrect to present these conclusions as scientific)

[jemmyw]

While I agree with you on the scientific front, I agree with the author on the risk/action cost front. There's not much cost to preventing the use of phones during school hours, it seems to be a net benefit to education and teacher/student relations even if the hypothesis is wrong.

Banning platforms from allowing under 16s to have accounts is harder because kids will work around it very easily, but I would be happy to see it happen anyway, and made Facebook's problem to deal with.

[cauch]

I'm 100% in favor in banning smartphone during school hours.

The big danger is to spread the incorrect conclusion "it's smartphone's fault". For example, if it is social media, then, we need to change social media, not just ban smartphones, because it will not stop social media to do even more victims, and the number of victims will be bigger if people were convinced by the incorrect conclusion.