doesn’t seem to work on mobile (just gives me an error when I try to publish, and I can’t copy an image URL for the piece because the keybord comes in front of the field 😅) and there’s apparently no way to publish articles on via mobile, so I’ll just post this article as a note. — Technological Optimism is Rational «Before long, children will disappear from our streets altogether. Drastic steps must be taken to eliminate this threat to pedestrians and especially children» That quote comes from a judge in 1920s Philadelphia, and it perfectly captures the spirit of technological pessimism: dramatic and exaggerated, yet pointing to a problem that was undeniably real. Anyone who has raised small children in a car-free neighborhood knows the judge had a point. Still, we’re probably fortunate that the response wasn’t nearly as drastic as he wanted. In the beginning, there were no traffic signs, no lane markings, no right-of-way rules, no blood alcohol limits. Roads were shared by people, horses, and the new automobiles, whose noise often terrified horses into bolting. Children and adults alike, with no experience of machines that were both so heavy and so fast, were frequently struck and killed. Most of the solutions, however, were anything but drastic. People gradually learned to live with cars. Better roads, standardized traffic rules, signs, and other regulations eventually made automobiles safer than horses had ever been. Of course, we could make cars even safer today—for example, by preventing them from ever exceeding 30 km/h. But doing so would likely create problems far greater than the roughly 100 traffic fatalities Norway experiences each year. In other words, we’ve arrived at a compromise between the benefits and costs of the technology, forged through a century of trial and error. Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have worried about new technologies. Socrates distrusted writing. In ancient Athens, writing was the iPhone of its day: something young people obsessed over and taught each other, while their parents shook their heads and wondered what would become of the world. How would the next generation ever learn to remember anything if they could simply write it down? They’d become hopelessly dependent on their clay tablets. Civilization was doomed. They weren’t entirely wrong. The illiterate world disappeared forever, replaced by literate civilizations. Research even suggests that people in oral cultures develop stronger memories than those of us who grow up surrounded by writing. We become good at whatever we practice—but most people don’t bother mastering skills they no longer need. The inventors of the printing press faced much the same skepticism. Cheap Bibles were all well and good—although they would soon cause enormous upheaval once peasants discovered what Jesus actually had to say about the rich—but couldn’t those same presses just as easily spread heresy and worse? Once again, the skeptics were right. Their civilization absolutely did collapse. It was simply replaced by a better one. Technology is dangerous—to individuals and to societies—and the pessimists usually have a point. At the same time, it’s hard for us today to cheer for those who wanted a world without printing presses, writing, or automobiles. As a technological optimist, I suspect future generations will feel much the same way about social media, screens, and video games. Jonathan Haidt, Harvard psychologist, joins the long line of technological pessimists warning that the sky is falling. A renowned psychologist armed with statistics can wield enormous influence. Haidt is famous not only for challenging gender and race theories in academia with unusual civility, but also for fiercely criticizing helicopter parenting and defending children’s right to explore the world unsupervised. “Children are robust,” he argued, helping build the free-range parenting movement in America. Nine-year-olds, he insisted, were perfectly capable of riding the New York subway alone. Then smartphones arrived. And suddenly it seemed children were less robust than Haidt had believed. Or perhaps YouTube turned out to be more dangerous than the NYC subway. The early research warning about screens and social media suffered from serious methodological weaknesses. In a 2019 report, the World Health Organization summarized the evidence bluntly: “The overall quality of evidence was rated as very low.” Researchers were criticized for confusing cause and effect, relying heavily on self-reported data, reporting tiny effect sizes, proposing speculative causal relationships, and drawing conclusions that far exceeded what the evidence justified. The criticism reached its peak when Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski demonstrated that, using the same methods and data employed by many screen-time researchers, he could show that eating potatoes posed roughly the same psychological risk. Haidt was not discouraged. In 2024 he published The Anxious Generation, assembling the available evidence into one coherent narrative, complete with graphs, responses to critics, and conclusions that many readers found difficult to dispute. Among his central claims were that social media is especially harmful to girls between the ages of ten and thirteen, that endless scrolling creates a form of addiction, and that “the only solution” is government regulation. Parents proved more than willing to listen. Across the Western world, politicians now seem to be competing to deliver exactly the regulations Haidt calls for. Most parents have noticed how difficult it is to pry children away from their screens. Stories abound of children encountering grooming, pornography, or graphic violence online. Some spend virtually every waking moment glued to a screen. Various forms of screen use have been linked to impaired cognitive development, poor academic performance (something I’ll return to), mental illness, and poorer labor market outcomes. In short, Haidt already had a congregation before his book even appeared. The tone of today’s debate strongly resembles the climate debate a decade ago. The science is settled. The evidence is in. The discussion is over. Not only is social media dangerous for children, but the government must intervene immediately with what is supposedly a very simple solution. Just as with climate policy, however, even airtight science does not automatically produce airtight politics. And Haidt’s science isn’t airtight. The available data does appear to show that the rise of social media coincides with a sharp increase in mental health problems among children and adolescents. None of the competing explanations—economic cycles, smartphones themselves, or increased diagnosis—fit the data quite as well. Up to this point, I’m largely in agreement with Haidt. The real question is why. Haidt does what statistical research generally encourages: he assumes the simplest possible causal pathway. Children use social media, something happens in their minds, and they develop anxiety or depression. But nature has never cared about making life easy for statisticians. Complex systems produce complex causal relationships. The type of research Haidt favors was designed to study molecules and cells—entities that obediently follow natural laws—not creative human beings shaped by ideas, relationships, and emotions. His analysis relies almost entirely on quantitative measures, much of it based on self-reporting. Left out is an almost endless list of variables: family life, school environment, diet, sleep, the specific accounts teenagers actually follow and why—in short, almost all meaningful context. If it can’t easily be measured and quantified, it barely exists within Haidt’s framework. One consequence is that even something as basic as determining which came first—the psychological problems or the social media use—becomes surprisingly difficult. The relationships also turn out to be more complicated than Haidt suggests. Several studies find that moderate social media use is associated with better mental health than either very low or very high use. Among adolescents already diagnosed with mental health conditions, the relationship between well-being and screen time sometimes appears to run in precisely the opposite direction from what Haidt finds in the general population. Nor does he adequately control for the effects of overly controlling parents. In other words, Haidt has identified the same kind of correlation that exists between headaches and painkillers—and concluded that painkillers cause headaches. The deeper problem is that Haidt’s explanation is only one among an almost infinite number of theories consistent with the data. For example, I could propose that social media broadens children’s horizons, exposing them to more adult perspectives on life. Those children may then experience school as a prison and view constant lectures from teachers and parents as a form of gaslighting—an experience that is itself well documented as a source of psychological distress. Whether you find that explanation convincing isn’t really the point. The point is that it enjoys the same scientific status as Haidt’s explanation. It fits the data he presents just as well while pointing toward an entirely different causal story. Here’s another hypothesis: perhaps believing that social media is harmful is itself psychologically harmful. If children genuinely enjoy something that every trusted adult insists is dangerous and morally wrong, that conflict may produce guilt, anxiety, and emotional distress. Again, it’s an equally scientific explanation. Just with a completely different mechanism. In fact, almost every alleged harm of screen use can be explained away this way. That doesn’t mean we should explain it away. Only that we can. If we choose. With scientific legitimacy. Haidt therefore commits what I see as a fundamentally unscientific error when he moves from demonstrating a correlation to asserting that his preferred explanation is the most likely one. And he does something I would describe as both irresponsible and authoritarian when he then proposes a political solution and presents it to the public as “the only option.” I believe he does this because of technological pessimism—perhaps even technological hysteria. Why is this pessimism so persistent? How can its predictions be disproven over and over again, with all of humanity watching, only to return in full force every time a new technology appears? Part of the answer, I think, is that technology’s costs are always immediate and highly visible, while its benefits often emerge only years later—and even then can be surprisingly difficult to recognize. Many people, for example, believe the world would be better without firearms. Yet firearms shattered the aristocracy’s monopoly on organized violence. We’re better off for that today. Technology allows people to do things that were previously impossible, forcing society to adapt. Our culture, laws, and political institutions are always designed around what used to be possible, and adapting them to a new reality is often painful, slow, and messy. But as with the automobile, we eventually tend to find an equilibrium where the technology can be used productively without causing unacceptable harm. Seen this way, history itself is one long process of adaptation between technology, society, and culture. I’m not aware of many examples where humanity has successfully put the genie back in the bottle. New possibilities are usually too useful, too accessible, and too tempting. Parents can certainly hide the game consoles, delete Instagram, send their children outside, and hope something magical happens. I suspect, however, that the childhood of the 1990s—with apple stealing, prank phone calls, and children’s television at six o’clock—is gone for good. The world we grew up in is never coming back. It now belongs on history’s scrapheap alongside illiterate civilizations, feudalism, and the Victorian era. None of this is meant to trivialize the price we pay for technological progress. Around one hundred traffic deaths each year are a tragedy, however you look at it. Nor am I suggesting technological pessimists should keep quiet. They perform an important function by restraining blind optimists, who can be even more dangerous. My point is simply that technology almost certainly brings benefits that are much harder to see—and history strongly suggests those benefits usually outweigh the costs, often by a considerable margin. If that’s true, then attempts to ban new technologies and turn back the clock may end up harming future generations far more than the technologies themselves. I don’t believe screens are especially dangerous. I don’t believe social media is especially dangerous. Not even for thirteen-year-old girls. Time—not today’s research—will ultimately deliver the verdict. My advice is simple: stay calm, keep a cool head, and allow society to adapt under careful observation. Because if history teaches us one thing with remarkable consistency, it’s this: Teenagers have never been controllable.