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What we're getting wrong about teens and tech | Candice Odgers | Your Body on Tech
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Haidt's Graphs, Cherry-Picked Data, and the Incentive to Scare
At 35:45 · chapter starts 33:48
Manoush names the elephant in the room: Haidt's book is compelling precisely because the graphs are visually striking, mapping rising teen depression against rising smartphone adoption. Odgers, a quantitative psychologist who teaches graduate statistics, explains exactly how these narratives get manufactured [1] — Candice Odgers "Haidt's Anxious Generation maps rising teen depression against rising smartphone use in compelling graphs. Odgers says this kind of statist…" 33:48 : expand the axes, find cherry-picked time windows, and any two trends that share a roughly similar shape can be made to look causal. She cites a recent Financial Times graph linking smartphones to global birth-rate decline — ignoring that birth rates also fell after the Great Recession for economic reasons — as a representative example of data being 'cooked.' The commercial and political incentives are enormous: a California voter survey showed that banning smartphones from schools and social media for minors is the only policy position on which Democrats, Republicans, and independents fully agree. Children don't vote, Odgers observes dryly, making them an easy political target. The real danger, she argues, is not that the data is wrong but that the wrong story displaces the harder, less sellable work of actually supporting kids.
Haidt's Anxious Generation maps rising teen depression against rising smartphone use in compelling graphs. Odgers says this kind of statistical storytelling is misleading — axes get cherry-picked, lines get manipulated, and people are being scared with cooked data.
Depression is one of the leading causes of disability in the world, making accurate identification of its causes critical rather than allowing misleading narratives to redirect policy efforts.
