The news cycle has now turned to Arday’s principle accuser, Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas is another colorful character which, ironically like Arday himself, invites obsessive news coverage3. Cofnas describes himself as a “race realist” which, steelmanning that for a bit, from my understanding means that he sees genetics as contributing to real human population differences, such as regarding intelligence/IQ. Thus, if IQ differences are seen between races, these are genetically set and society should be “realist” and adjust to this reality accordingly. Cofnas’ critics see many of his comments as explicitly racist, eugenicist, and segregationist.

Now, Cofnas has been suspended from his university pending an internal disciplinary hearing. Cofnas’ last update on this suggested he may be able to finish out his one-year stay at Ghent University, though the investigation continues. The suspension appears to be directly related to his “outing” of Arday’s plagiarism and has raised significant concerns about academic freedom and free speech. Predictably, large groups of scholars have both defended Cofnas, but an opposing group also defended the university's investigation against him.

This issue is tricky because it inevitably muddies several competing concerns. As I see it these are:

1. Does Cofnas have the academic freedom to point out serious flaws in another academic’s work without fear of retribution?

2. If the notoriety of #1 results in greater scrutiny of Cofnas’ own work and that work is determined to be seriously flawed (but not outright plagiarized or fraudulent) can a university take action accordingly without this being retribution for #1?

3. Do universities risk privileging some deeply flawed/ideological work over others, both chilling controversial research and academic freedom, while also decreasing trust in the objectivity of universities?

4. Does Cofnas’ behavior extend to harassment or bullying, and how exactly do we define these in a way that helps guide personnel matters? Can accusations of harassment and bullying themselves be harassment and bullying?

   Share

My prior is that universities should be very cautious when it comes to academic freedom, and that any whiff of retribution can be both chilling and detrimental to the reputation of universities which was already deeply stung in the Arday case. That said, I don’t think all the issues here are clear-cut, and some nuances are worth considering. Or, put another way, both sides are at some risk here of intellectual inconsistency, which could lay various traps for them. Let’s consider the issues.

Does Cofnas have the academic freedom to point out serious flaws in another academic’s work without fear of retribution?

This, I think, is the easiest question to answer. Of course, Cofnas should have this right. Arday’s death is tragic, and, assuming it was a suicide or otherwise brought on by the stress of public shame, there’s probably plenty of blame to go around (including to Arday himself, as well as Cambridge University for somehow hiring someone poorly qualified for his position, and news media for going batshit crazy). My impression is that Cofnas’ claims about plagiarism appear to be largely true and there is nothing unethical in bringing this to light. That Cofnas has opinions about race that many people find odious4 isn’t terribly relevant to the truth of Arday’s plagiarism. As such, I think universities would do well to be very careful of anything that even hints at retribution.

If the notoriety of #1 results in greater scrutiny of Cofnas’ own work and that work is determined to be seriously flawed (but not outright plagiarized or fraudulent) can a university take action accordingly without this being retribution for #1.

Here’s where things get tricky for both sides. Arday’s work came under intense scrutiny (including by Cofnas) due to Arday’s notoriety and publicity seeking. Is what’s good for the goose not also good for the gander? If Cofnas’ work really is as bad as critics allege, I’m not sure his defenders have a strong leg to argue Ghent University should ignore this just because those criticisms drew attention due to Arday’s death.

Consider, many anti-woke people have been arguing for years that certain fields are just so bad they should be eliminated from universities altogether. To be honest, I’m fairly sympathetic to that argument, with the proviso that unis should do this via future hiring decisions rather than firing professors to whom they have already committed academic freedom. But if, say, gender studies or fat studies is fatally flawed due to its lack of rigor and ideological slant, couldn’t the same also be true for some of the race science stuff? My preferred method of focusing on future hiring doesn’t really matter as, very often, people seem to argue for closing down departments and firing professors now. If you want to close down the various “studies” departments, how can you say coming for the race science stuff is somehow against academic freedom?

By contrast, folk on the left have the opposing problem…if you want to fire Nathan Cofnas, how do you defend obviously empirically poor activist directed fields like the various “studies” departments?

I think both sides will fall back on “myside bias”, essentially “gender studies/race science (pick one) is far more rigorous than gender studies/race science (pick the other one).” But ehhhhh….I’m not sure that’s true. They both seem overstated at best, and ideologically slanted5. I’m all for increasing rigor at the universities, but if we’re to do that, neither side can establish sacred cows.

Do universities risk privileging some deeply flawed/ideological work over others, both chilling controversial research and academic freedom, while also decreasing trust in the objectivity of universities?

Yes, obviously. But, again, the question is how to balance real discipline/disciplinary issues against the perception of bias. I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to suggest Cambridge gave Arday a lot of leeway when they shouldn’t have because he and his research happened to prop up a particular social narrative. And at the same time, Cofnas’ race science stuff, whatever we think of it, makes him correspondingly vulnerable to scrutiny. I’m not saying he shouldn’t get that scrutiny, but Ghent suddenly becoming the rigorous taskmaster when Cambridge rolled over like a kitten for Arday is going to be noticed. To be fair, Ghent isn’t responsible for Cambridge’s mistakes, but that’s not going to matter for public perceptions of universities writ large.

Does Cofnas’ behavior extend to harassment or bullying, and how exactly do we define these in a way that helps guide personnel matters? Can accusations of harassment and bullying themselves be harassment and bullying?

This, I think is an interesting part of the question, and one that adds further nuance. The question here is not whether Cofnas criticized Arday’s scholarship, but whether he went beyond the pale and engaged in behavior unbecoming and unprofessional.

There is little question that Arday experienced harassment, abuse and bullying. What is less clear is how responsible Cofnas is for it. Some certainly have accused Cofnas of instigating the bullying though others have also defended Cofnas’ actions. For what it is worth, I’ve yet to see any credible accusation that Cofnas directly harassed Arday, called for his death, encouraged others to harass Arday, etc. (though if someone knows of such evidence let me know).

Share

News media certainly took up the Arday story with true obsessive fury that, I think, did raise significant risks to Arday’s health. My perception is Cofnas didn’t discourage this, but I’m also not sure how responsible he is either. Should he have stayed silent about the plagiarism if that would have saved Arday’s life? I think that’s a tough moral question6.

Part of the trick is, aside from clear instances of unwanted contact, death threats, etc., the margins of what constitutes “harassment” or “bullying” aren’t really clear. If one academic takes obvious victory laps for destroying the career of another, even if justified, is that “bullying”? I dunno…maybe, probably? Of course, that’s nothing new among academics. I’m reminded a bit of Amy Cuddy’s “power pose” stuff. Similar to Arday, she had propelled some weak research into massive notoriety (though no plagiarism accusations, to be clear), and this became part of psychology’s “replication crisis”. But I do remember about that time, some of the criticism of Cuddy went well past her research into personal stuff and even just basic “kicking a dog that is down” schadenfreude glee rather than scientific integrity7. I think Cuddy has a book on adult bullying coming out next year that I’ll be interested to read, particularly assuming she speaks to this time.

At the same time, accusations of harassment and bullying can themselves be weaponized. I had some personal experience with this during my time on the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives where “collegiality” rules seemed to sometimes be used to silence criticism of beloved policy agendas8.

Ultimately, I would urge Ghent University to tread lightly here. If they’ve got credible evidence of direct harassment by Cofnas of Arday that’s one thing, but I do think academics should have wide latitude to criticize, even if they go about it in the manner of agenda-driven douchebags9.

Target Sells Kids Racist Halloween Costumes

Alright, so I saw this pop up on my news feed this week. I’m pretty skeptical of the “everything is racist” vibe from 2020, so I went to look at this rather warily. The jist of this story is that Target decided to sell a Halloween costume1 for kids that was a kind of grinning clown. Only some people felt that it represented anti-black caricatures and had a “Minstrel show” vibe.

Again, we’ve heard a lot of “everything is racist” stuff back in 2020, much of which was deeply goofy and part of a widespread race moral panic. So cue a little mild eye-rolling from me as I took a look. The picture of the costume in question is below, judge for yourself.

Alright, so I admit that’s preeeeetty bad. I mean it’s a bad costume to begin with, but ok, fair enough it does look like Minstrel show type stuff and I can understand why people felt it was racist. It’s so bad it’s kind of funny in the “what were people thinking?” kind of way so I’m a bit more inclined to chuckle than publicly rend my clothes. Nonetheless, I can understand people found this racist.

I don’t think Target execs sat around and said, “Hey, let’s do a racist blackface Minstrel show clown thing for kids. People will love it!” I’ve seen enough group entities, committees, companies2, etc., go completely bonkers and actively suppress “tire kicking” such that truly bad ideas can pass though without anyone saying out loud, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t do this…” My best guess is this was developed and passed through as a batch with other costumes3 and it was rushed. I wonder how many human eyes really even set on it prior to it being offered to the public4?

Even the gloves, my god, the gloves. Target is already under fire for rolling back DEI policies5, and understandably pulled this from its catalog. Don’t send you kids out with this monstrosity folks!

A Texas University Decides To Destroy Itself6

Red state politicians really don’t like universities. I get it, universities have definitely dug themselves into a woke-hole over the past decade or so, and I’ve been pretty vocal myself about the need for them to reform. But, historically, US universities were the envy of the world. We want to return to that, not destroy them altogether.

Unfortunately, some conservative politicians prefer destruction. In Texas, one of the biggest reds of red states, politicians passed a law limiting remote work for professors. Particularly post-covid, many professors realized they can do a lot of work from home such as grading, working on research papers, etc. The zoom era allows meetings to occur online and even many universities are doing classes online. I don’t love online classes myself (Stetson is mostly in person other than summers) but it works for some people I guess.

The Texas law is obvious geared toward getting professors back on campus rather than remote. But Texas A&M University Victoria decided to interpret the law in the most draconian way possible. Effectively they are demanding that faculty punch a 9-5 40 hour work week clock7. This has caused mass resignations, class cancelations, and general chaos.

Now, normal human beings will ask, “Why shouldn’t professors work normal hours like the rest of us?” And that’s a very fair question!

There are two answers. The first is that being a college professor just doesn’t quite work like other jobs. In one sense we’re kind of always on…I’d say I do some work almost every day of the year aside from big holidays (Christmas and Christmas Eve, New Years Eve and Day, Thanksgiving, July 4 and my birthday)8. And I may do work from when I wake up to late in the evening. But I’m not working continuously. I’m mixing that up with other stuff…hanging with the family, personal life stuff, appointments, classic Dr. Who marathons, Dungeons and Dragons, exercise and my pool. It’s an exchange that suits this particular career…you never really are “off”9 but at the same time you have a lot of flexibility in how and when you do your work. That’s not something that works for everyone, but for pretty autonomous people it’s a fair exchange I think. Do some faculty abuse it? Sure…though far fewer than you’d think. I don’t think, you know, coal miners have to weep for the plight of the tenured faculty member, but I’d say most faculty do carry their weight.

The other thing is, particularly for those of us with degrees that have practical applications (clinical psychology in my case, but also medicine, nursing, engineering, business, law, etc.), if we had to be in a punch-the-clock kind of job we could make lots more in those practical fields than in teaching college. Which is one of the reasons I think we’re seeing a lot of TAMU Victoria faculty leave.

This seems to be the kind of decision made when one wants to turn the screws on one’s opponents rather than thoughtfully decide if there’s a problem to be fixed in the first place (probably not in this case), and if this is the best policy to fix it (clearly not in this case). Policy born from emotion or the desire to enact revenge on others is seldom good policy.

I’ll be curious to see where this goes for the rest of the TAMU system but I am once again reminded why I’m so thankful to be at Stetson!

Interestingly, unlike the video game panic where, for a time, there seemed to be a majority of studies3 that supported links between violent games and aggression (at least until that all collapsed under psychology’s replication crisis and newer, preregistered studies failed to find effects), there never has been anything like consistent, dramatic research findings linking social media to youth mental health. The predictive value of social media time on youth mental health, particularly once other factors like neuroticism, family environment and school environment are controlled, is basically zero. Nor is there any academic consensus social media is harmful or “addictive”.

For awhile, some advocates claimed that there was consistent evidence in the experimental studies. Basically, these studies would randomize people into two groups, one of whom would be told to reduce or eliminate social media time, the other group to keep using social media as usual. It turns out that claims that these studies produce consistent positive outcomes are false, with three meta-analyses now all finding either null or “weak” effects of social media reduction on mental health. These studies also have major limitations in other respects, which I’ll get to (teaser: after the paywall!)

Share

Now a new study has gotten some media attention. This one is interesting because it attempted to replicate an earlier influential study cited by supporters of social media bans. The original study appeared to show reducing social media time resulted in small improvements in mental health. However, the original study was not preregistered, which means researcher expectancy effects may have created a false positive result. By contrast, the new study was preregistered, significantly restricting the researchers’ ability to monkey around with their data to force a desired result. So what did they find?

Read more

Not always, but very often the people I’ve seen making this argument seem to have been the CEOs or other administrators for companies involved in some kind of media literacy, youth advocacy, or tech approaches to youth wellness. Meaning, a lot of them seem to have something to sell, which doesn’t disqualify their opinion2 but is nonetheless worth remembering given the old slogan: “It is hard to get someone to learn something if their job depends upon them not knowing it.”

Obviously, I’m sympathetic to the free-speech angle of this logic. Youth bans and age-gating have very serious free-speech implications. We’re basically handing governments the ability to track, not just youth, but adults on the internet. They may also get substantial control over content directly (though bans and age gating and outright censorship) or indirectly (via trial decisions that are too expensive for social media companies not to comply with government wishes). Is this really what we want? I think that’s absurd, but maybe that’s just me.

Share

However, the “social media harms” angle of this argument is dicey I think. It’s dicey for several reasons.

· “Harms” is both vague and causal. Exactly what are we talking about? In some areas, increasingly evidence suggests time spent on social media is neither correlated nor causally associated with youth mental health. According to CDC data, youth mental health has now been improving for years (though many people have blithely ignored this despite pointing to mental health data in the past). Bullying went down, not up, during the social media era even with cyberbullying factored in according to National Center for Education Statistics data. That doesn’t mean there are no reasonable concerns…are we talking about adult content slipping into child feeds, or catfishing, or poor content moderation of harassment and threats (all legitimate concerns)? Just saying “harms” leaves it to the reader to imagine what you mean, and often their suppositions won’t be evidence based.

· “Harms” is also highly emotive language. It’s unlikely to convince people to be less inclined to endorse highly restrictive approaches to “protect the children.”

· It still makes it sound like social media is a major issue for youth though the data suggests that, even with a few reasonable concerns, social media really just isn’t. The pressing problems for youth remain families in distress and dysfunctional schools. Mike Males has been banging this drum with good CDC data, but people just aren’t listening to the degree they should.

· Ultimately the “harm” language feeds directly into the narrative of people pushing for bans, not detracts from it. To do that we need to be clearer.

Subscribe now

I think these arguments are made in good faith (again, acknowledging some financial incentives for at least some of these folks), but are just not convincing. Here’s where I think arguments really do work. My suggestions are:

· Drop “harms” from the vocabulary entirely. If there are specific areas of concern, detail them specifically, not with vague and alarmist language like “harms”.

· We need to be clearer that the evidence just doesn’t support people’s moral intuition about social media. That includes beliefs that social media influences mental health, reading, grades, time spent with friends, etc. The evidence just isn’t there. Social media does seem to detract from watching TV, so that can be fun to point out.

· Nor is there evidence social media use is addictive in any coherent sense. Any “addiction” language should also be struck from our vocabularies.

· Discussing science is often hard, nuanced, and we need to be careful of making people’s eyes glaze over. But pointing to it patiently and repetitively does work over time.

· We need to be clear with people that bullying is at historic lows during the social media/smartphone age. We need to be clear that youth mental health is improving not getting worse.

· We need to be clear that the main places kids have problems is within their own families and schools. CDC data makes clear that youth suicides track the academic school year beautifully. That’s correlational data, sure, but there’s no such correlational data now for social media or smartphones. All those Anxious Generation graphs are outdated.

· We should be honest that, yes social media companies have massive financial conflicts of interest and often are deeply unlikeable and have contributed to their own current problems. But we should also note that trial lawyers, people selling pop books to the public stoking anxieties, advocacy groups, etc., also often have massive financial incentives as well. The conflicts of interest cut both ways.

· It massively helps to remain patient and calm. Sometimes people get mad when you tell them their worst fears aren’t true. But sometimes, if you give them a day or a week or a month or a year, they may reconsider that position. I won’t claim to always be good at taking my own advice here, but I find it really does work.

· Compassionately remind people that the “your lying eyes” effect (i.e., confirmation bias) is real. Anecdotes are not evidence and the 1980s was no period of bliss for youth.

· Point out that what concerns do exist for youth and social media (getting into dumb fights online, sharing personal information, controlling algorithms and notifications, etc.) can be handled with good media literacy. Banning imparts no such skills.

· So far, evidence suggests bans just don’t work. Preference falsification suggests that kids and, more surprisingly, even some of their parents, circumvent the bans once they are in place. Sometimes people don’t really want what they say they want.

· We should point out better all the past moral panics over books, radio, kaleidoscopes, comic books, rock music, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, etc. The patterns for social media/smartphones/AI are all the same. Help them look for the signs, like the inevitable unwarranted comparisons to cigarette smoking.

· And, yes, we should talk about the free-speech implications too.

Basically, the only way to challenge a moral panic is to meet it’s arguments head-on with good data, patience, and compassion. Most people really do want what’s best for kids. They’ve just allowed their heads to be filled by the scary and profitable nonsense from politicians, advocacy groups, news media and books like the Anxious Generation. Unwinding all that garbage will take time, but it can be done.

The move from adolescence to adulthood is marked by successive milestones in our culture. At 16 you might get your driver’s license. By 18, you (hopefully) graduate high school, can join the military and buy cigarettes1 and can vote. Perhaps the most celebrated, at 21 you can legally drink alcohol. Less noticed perhaps, by 25 the age penalties when renting a car mostly go away.

Aging, is kind of like that too…50, get your AARP card, 55+ those special communities, 62 is early retirement, 67 typical retirement and 70 the max beneficial age. At age 65 you can get on Medicare. There are some medical ones too like the start of colonoscopies and the shingles vaccine. I guess we don’t celebrate those with a wild night like we do hitting the drinking age.

My wife and I are on the same page about birthdays meaning to be celebrated. We’re gonna get older anyway, so why not get presents and some cake? We approach it not unlike an 11-year-old would and should. Hell, I’ve had bouncy houses for my birthdays a couple times because bouncy houses are fun and, at this age, who gives a crap what anyone else thinks?

A lot of people are weirdly grumpy about birthdays. There are probably lots of reasons for that, some of them pretty understandable I’d imagine. But hating them because it’s a sign of aging is…well, aging is going to happen anyway, so might as well enjoy the day. I am determined to do 0 work on my birthdays. We kept this one relaxing, so there were a couple good meals, opening of presents, some jogging and pool time, a nice afternoon nap and capped off by some Dungeons and Dragons.

55 isn’t exactly elderly, sure, but it’s definitely late middle age and elderly is around the corner. To put it in perspective, I asked ChatGPT to summarize actuarial statistics on deaths at my age. By 55, 11% of people born in my birth cohort are now dead (14% for males specifically). That’s not tremendous, but that’s not trivial either. By this point, I know a fair number of old friends, work colleagues, people I grew up with, etc., who are dead not from surprise causes (accidents, homicide, suicide, war, natural disaster, etc.), but from what might reasonably be thought of as “old age” diseases (cancer, heart attacks, strokes, etc.) The dam hasn’t broken, but the cracks are a’trickling.

Share

My Substack buddy Todd Kashdan recently posted a simple calculation to guess how many “healthy” years we likely have. The gist of this seems to be that the median person can count on until about age 66 before noticeable quality of life declines begin. I imagine though that this varies quite a bit, depending on current health, parents health during the elderly years, activity level, etc. I can imagine that people who’ve toiled at physical labor all their lives will have the worst of it, as that labor catches up with them. We professors are, by comparison, pampered and perfumed, so there’s that to our benefit. At 55, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape too. I just spent part of March hiking around the volcanoes of Hawaii, so I think I’ve got more than 11 good years in me yet. One recent study suggested that, far from a progressive decline, we tend to experience rapid shifts at age 44 and 60. If that’s true, I think I navigated 44 pretty well. I’d say, for the most part, I can still do most of what I could do at 25. I’m pretty optimistic at getting into my 80s with decent physical health as my dad did.

In many ways, the 50s bring real benefits. I have far more social and financial security than I did in my 20s. I think I’m generally more relaxed, though I was always a fairly happy camper. There are definitely downsides…this period is often referred to as the sandwich generation, as people may still be taking care of kids, but also their declining parents. And, yeah I hear that.

A lot of satisfaction in the 50s too I imagine depends on how successful one feels they are. Famous psychologist Erik Erikson talked about various life stages, including about Integrity vs Despair as a kind of final stage of reflection. In that stage we look back to see how worthwhile our life was, did we meet our goals, etc2. Although Erikson thought of this clearly as a post-retirement reflection, I imagine some of this begins in the 50s. The sand is running out of the timepiece and, if life goals haven’t been met, it’s increasingly unlikely that they will be. Suicide continues to increase through the 50s (middle aged people commit suicide far more frequently compared to teens, contrary to public belief). Yes, I know I’m inviting anecdotes of folks who changed life course at 55, dumped their unfulfilling job, and became a world-famous astrophysicist, curing cancer and writing a successful series of children’s books on the side. But that’s just not the norm. I’ve been fortunate…have an amazing wife and cool son, a job I (mostly3) like, the opportunity to travel, lots of time to engage in hobbies, etc. I’ve written a few works of fiction (which you should definitely buy4), so there’s a lot I’m proud of5. But I can imagine for those who didn’t quite hit their goals, the pressure and urgency must really ratchet up.

Of course, it’s hard not to reflect not just on the potential for physical decline, but also the inevitability of death. I find myself not worrying yet about it too much…of course, I will miss me! As a deist, I guess I’m a bit more optimistic than some that a great mystery awaits. Of course, there’s only one way to really know what, if anything, comes next.

I think too, much of the anxiety over death comes from the inevitability of being forgotten. Do you remember who your great grandparents were or great-great grandpanrets6 were? Even famous people tend to be forgotten surprisingly fast, with a few exceptions of the Julius Caesar caliber. I recently came across this image:

It’s a fun picture, and it’s of Mary Pickford, contemplating women getting the vote in 1920. Pickford lived a very colorful life it turns out and was actually one of the most famous movie stars of the silent movie age. But have you ever heard of her? Death anonymity is nearly universal, even for those who lived remarkably impressive lives. Do you remember who your state senators were in 1925 or the congressperson for your congressional district 100 years ago? Do you know who they are now, haha? Point being, within 100 years even our descendants won’t know who we are. I think that plays more role in the psychology of aging7 than we often acknowledge and can lead to a lot of irrationality of the “clinging to the past” variety.

So, overall, aging isn’t necessarily bad. Navigate it as well as you can, stay active, watch the booze and the ciggies, and stay social. And hope for a bit of luck. And I’ll see you on the other side.

Alas! The cost of those couple bucks has been about two weeks of itchies which have been annoying since, of course, one puts sunscreen on most of one’s body. For some reason, my face doesn’t get the rash at least, but my arms, legs and torso have been angry and red1.

For that reason, I’ve been a bit more alert than maybe I otherwise would be to the weird culture war breaking out about sunscreen. The first salvo came in a report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) which tests and rates sunscreens on safety and effectiveness. The EWG is very clear in acknowledging that sun exposure causes skin cancer and that effective sunscreens can be a useful protection against these effects. However, they claim that the vast majority of sunscreens are either ineffective or can cause damage to skin. Ironically, they recommend mineral sunscreens like zinc oxide (the reef safe stuff that I’m sometimes allergic to, likely because of a secondary ingredient in some brands). For non-mineral sunscreens they recommend Bemotrizinol, but unfortunately most sunscreens available in the US contain ingredients that are absorbed into the skin and may irritate or damage it (I hear that!)

However, many scientists and dermatologists have rubbished the EWG report, calling it unscientific. Naturally, rather than a debate over science, this has spun into a culture war.

The anti-sunscreen movement appears to be a loose collection of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) folks, health influencers, and science skeptics. Renowned experts ranging from Robert Kennedy Jr to Gwyneth Paltrow have weighed in on anti-sunscreen and the belief people should have “natural” exposure to sun2.

This movement appears, to me, to combine some plausible and crackpot notions. First, the chemicals in some sunscreens may be absorbed into the skin causing some harm (plausible). Second, there’s a kind of “Big Sunscreen” conspiracy to hide the truth, etc., etc. (maybe a bit plausible but heading into tin foil hat territory). Third, they believe we have evolved to have unfettered access to the sun (forgetting some of us evolved recently in, say, Ireland or Scotland). If one must put something on, maybe try coconut oil or beef tallow (so we’ll end up crispy and delicious). This last clearly goes against well-established research. The EWG, who are not part of MAHA, clearly acknowledge sun exposure causes cancer.

A movement spearheaded by Kennedy and the founder of a company called Goop doesn’t rack up a lot of credibility points at the start. Kennedy, in particular, is the source of plenty of nonsense theories such as Tylenol causing autism. But the theory here isn’t entirely nuts. Even the NYT article I linked above acknowledges that the main chemicals in most sunscreens, oxybenzone and avobenzone, do appear to be absorbed into skin and make it into our urine. Other studies suggest that the chemicals cause endocrine problems in animal studies. There’s no evidence this is harmful for humans, but some of the scientists’ responses in that article did feel a bit defensive and dismissive.

I must pause here to wonder…do I find myself actually defending the plausibility of a crackpot MAHA theory? Allow me to continue.

Share

The controversy sprung up again online when people found an article from 2024 which found that increased sunscreen use is correlated with increased skin cancers. This set up a familiar dynamic with the anti-sunscreen movement. Anti-sunscreen advocates took this as a “worrisome” causal link highlighting the dangers of sunscreen. Skeptics challenged, “correlation doesn’t equal causation!”. But what does the study actually say?

Let’s have a look!

Read more

Just as with questions over free will or the innate goodness/evil of humankind, we will find the answer to this question more difficult than we think. What do we mean by “tank”? Which qualities do we access? Is if fair to judge later years tanks against early years tanks? If you are a tank nerd like me1, you’ll find people have deep, emotive opinions about this. Just try telling people online that the M4 Sherman was a “Ronson/Zippo” lighter on treads that lit up first every time2 and you’ll see what I mean. So let’s establish some ground rules:

Just What Is a “Tank”?

The term tank was first used by the British in WWI, and referred to armored vehicles with treads that were rhomboid in shape with set gun locations, either machine guns or short barreled cannons. Over time, the term “tank” would come to refer to armored fighting vehicles with an enclosed, rotating turret. Ironically, the first tanks wouldn’t qualify as “tanks” under this definition, lacking the turret. This terminology issue also resulted in a confusing array of armored fighting vehicles by the time WW2 rolled around. Thus, we have, light, medium and heavy tanks, as well as tank destroyers and assault guns, all of which basically handled various “tank” roles3.

For the purposes of today, I’m going to include all fully tracked armored fighting vehicles designed specifically for either breakthrough or tank-busting roles. This will include tank destroyers and assault guns but not half-tracks or wheeled vehicles such as the German Puma. I’m sure there are some exceptions to this logic, but this is the basic definition I’ll work from.

Share

Comparisons Across Time

WW2 saw a period of rapid development in technology. Tanks were no exception. Not surprisingly the tanks of 1945 were generally better than those of 1940, so cross-temporal comparisons are a bit unfair. As such, we’ll be looking at some of the best tanks for each year of the war. I’m also going to limit myself to tanks that saw significant involvement in the war. That will necessarily leave out a few Johnny-Come-Latelies like the American Pershing or the British Comet. Both were excellent tanks, but only saw service in limited numbers at the very end of the war.

Sorry Folks

I’m afraid to say, some of the major combatants were just not known for making good tanks. Japanese tanks were generally bad, bad, bad. Granted tank warfare wasn’t as big a component of the Pacific War as it was the war in Europe. Italian tanks also generally were less well designed than other countries. I’m sad to say, just having ruled out the Comet above, British tanks don’t quite rise to the top either. To be fair, British tanks weren’t as bad as Japanese or Italian tanks and some, like the Churchill, were decent workhorses. But a lot also were lemons, and few rose to the top ranks of best tanks. The Brits really struggled with tank design during WW2.

Criteria

People can get really obsessed with armor and firepower and, yes, these were important for a successful tank. But other factors mattered as well. We’ll look at four. First, that armor and firepower everyone finds sexy. Second, secondary technology elements such as optics, targeting, radios, etc., that can help tanks see, hit other tanks, communicate with each other, get in the right spots, etc. Third…a tank is only useful if it’s running, so we’ll look at reliability and maintenance. And last…survivability. To keep good, experienced tank crews, it’s imperative that they survive critical hits to the vehicle to fight another day and gain experience. Also…crews tend to have better morale if they don’t think they’re in a death trap.

By contrast, we won’t be looking at factors outside the tank itself. Generally, we won’t consider relative crew training, air superiority, logistics quality, tactics, etc., that also make a big difference in battle. We’re just looking at the tank itself.

That having been established, let’s have a look!

Share

1939/1940: The war doesn’t really start in Europe at least until September 1939, and not much really changes through the next year. The Germans went into WW2 with loads and loads of crappy Panzer I and Panzer II tanks. Fortunately, they had a couple decent options. In these early years, the Panzer III (the Germans weren’t yet in the habit of giving their tanks fancy big cat names, which probably helps rob the Panzer III of any glory.

The Panzer III was actually a surprisingly good German tank for the early war years. In particular, given the performance of some of the later German tanks, the Panzer III was quite reliable. It had ok armor and gun for its time, good optics and radios.

The Panzer III’s main competitor here is the French Char B1 bis, a heavier tank that, on paper, was far more powerful than the Panzer III. It had better armor and a more powerful gun and, head on, the Panzer III would have had a tough time defeating it. However, better maneuverability, optics and radios and general crew ergonomics made the Panzer III the superior vehicle. So early on, though the Germans didn’t always have enough of them, the Panzer III is the superior early war tank.

• Panzer III Cheetah (sorry, it needs a cat name)

• Armor and Main Gun: 2.5 start (being a bit generous)

• Technical Features: 5 of 5 stars

• Reliability/Maintenance: 4 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 5 of 5 stars

1941: 1941 is where things really get cooking. France is basically out of the war. But here comes the Soviet Union and the USA. Sure, the Soviets got whooped pretty bad by the Germans in Operation Barbarossa, but the Germans were in for a shock and that comes in the form of our winner for 1941.

That, of course, is the T-34, a tank with remarkable advantages in armor and gun. To be sure, I think a lot of people are guilty of exaggerating how good the T-34 was overall and, in many respects like crew safety it sucked to a remarkable degree. But in 1941 it was nearly untouchable by German anti-tank weapons and sometimes being invincible in one category is enough to carry the day. Sloped armor and an excellent gun really make the T-34 stand out.

The T-34 is emblemic of Soviet (and Russian) tank doctrine then and now. Basically, design a tank that is easy to produce in vast numbers and capable of hitting hard. Don’t worry about bells and whistles and we’ve got plenty of spare Russians, so crew safety isn’t an issue. By the end of the war the T-34 would become cannon fodder for powerful German tanks, but in 1941 it was revolutionary on it’s own terms.

• T-34

• Armor and Main Gun: 5 of 5 stars

• Technical Features: 1 of 5 stars (absolutely no bells and whistles)

• Reliability/Maintenance: 4 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 1 of 5 stars (these were death traps)

Russian tanks have always had one basic problem, and we can still see that in the Ukraine War. Little thought goes into safety. There are lots of advantages being a tanker…obviously the crew is protected from small arms fire and shrapnel. But once something gets inside the tank death can be brutal (burning to death was not uncommon). Among other things, good tanks carefully protect ammunition so that the tank’s own explosive rounds aren’t detonated, obliterating everything inside the tank. Russian tank designers don’t seem to worry about this as much which is why, to the present day, you can see so many Russian tanks with their turrets blown clean off from internal explosions.

Share

1942: By 1942, everybody is trying to make better tanks and the US if fully in the war so that’s going to change things up. Still, we’re back to the Germans winning out once more. Once again, with a tank that barely gets any credit: the Panzer IV. The Panzer IV would become the most produced German “traditional” tank of the war (the StuG-III assault gun would be the only armored fighting vehicle to have more individual vehicles). It was a great, all around medium tank and, once again, more reliable than later German tanks. Never as powerful as the latter German “big cat” tanks, it nonetheless was equal to most allied medium tanks. It only ranks lower in the early war years because it had only been fitted with a low-velocity howitzer for infantry support. By 1942 it’s got a 75mm high-velocity gun and ready to take on the T-34.

• Panzer IV Serval (needs a cat name)4

• Armor and Main Gun: 4 of 5 stars

• Technical Features: 5 of 5 stars

• Reliability/Maintenance: 4 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 5 of 5 stars

1943: Now things get interesting because we’ve got a lot of great contenders on the field, each with unique benefits and drawbacks. The Panzer IV is still operational, but now the Americans are bringing on board the reliable M4 Sherman. Both the German Panther and Tiger tanks are operational, becoming two of the most powerful and fearsome tanks of the war. They might seem like easy contenders, but both also have teething problems around reliability. The Russians are also bringing out the big tank destroyers and the very humbly named Joseph Stalin tank series.

I think the early reliability problems with the Panther tanks exclude them for the moment. The Joseph Stalin tanks weren’t really ready yet, and tended to be slow and cumbersome. Tank destroyers like the SU-152 had similar issues, despite being powerful tank killers at long range. I don’t think the Sherman had yet quite reached its apogee either. So, there’s a strong argument that 1943 should also go to the Panzer IV. But I’m going to be controversial and go with the Tiger here. I have to make some controversial choices!

It’s a tough choice, I agree and I think I’ll get a lot of pushback for this one. Overall, though I think by late 1943, while the Tiger’s reliability problems weren’t entirely behind it, they were mediated enough to push it over the edge, given its other benefits. The Tiger, though lacking sloped armor, had decent protection and probably one of the best anti-tank guns for its time. It was generally well-designed for the crew as well. Once it’s worst reliability issues were somewhat mitigated, it became a truly fearsome tank worth of it’s reputation.

• Panzer VI Tiger

• Armor and Main Gun: 4.5 of 5 stars

• Technical Features: 5 of 5 stars

• Reliability/Maintenance: 2.5 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 5 of 5 stars

1944: 1944 to me is really a contest between two tanks. The first is the German Panther tank which, like it’s fellow Tiger big cat, had overcome some of its worst reliability issues from 1943. The other was the M4 Sherman which, similarly, was overcoming some of its worst features. For the Sherman, that primarily was its underpowered 75mm gun which was too weak by 1943 or so.

The Sherman was otherwise an amazing tank. Incredibly reliable and with probably one of best crew survivability records of the war. Its technical features were rival to the Germans as well. But its armor was thin and the main gun underpowered. It was not the Zippo lighter death trap some would later characterize it as, but it definitely was a tad underwhelming once the German big cats were on the prowl.

The answer was to stuff a bigger gun into the turret. This isn’t just as easy to manage as waving a wand, but both the Americans and British gave it a go. Here, I think the winner is a mixture of American and British ingenuity. Really, the best tank of 1944 is the Sherman Firefly…an M4 Sherman tank with the excellent British 17-pounder high velocity gun in the turret. The Firefly became the first British/American tank to be able to take on big cat German tanks on their own terms.

• Sherman Firefly

• Armor and Main Gun: 4 of 5 stars (still not the best armor)

• Technical Features: 5 of 5 stars

• Reliability/Maintenance: 5 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 5 of 5 stars

1945: The last year of the war sees a massive shift in tactics and needs. The Germans are now fully on the defensive. Here we see an unusual and underappreciated little vehicle rise to the top, acting mainly in ambush/defense roles and racking up incredible kill ratios, particularly against the Soviets.

The StuG-III isn’t a “traditional” tank as it has no turret, with a powerful 75mm anti-tank gun mounted in the body of a Panzer-III tank. Along with the similar and even smaller “Hetzer” assault gun, these two little fellows end up with some of the highest kill ratios of the war. Neither looking terribly impressive, nor having cool big-cat names, they are incredibly effective, particularly in this last year of the war.

• StuG III

• Armor and Main Gun: 4.5 of 5 stars

• Technical Features: 5 of 5 stars

• Reliability/Maintenance: 5 of 5 stars

• Crew Safety/Ergonomics: 4 of 5 stars (it was cramped)

And we kind of come full circle…we started with the Panzer III and we end with the StuG III, which was built on the Panzer III chassis.

I’m sure a few of these picks will be controversial. So what do you think? What were the best tanks of WW2?

Interestingly, many of today’s views run completely contrary to the fears of parents in the 80s. Increasingly, we’re seeing a romanticization of the idea of “free play”. I see people online portraying the 80s as an era where children didn’t use screens, would go bounding out of the home with little more than a goodbye to mom and dad and spent the whole day completely out of contact, exploring a remarkable safe and risk-free (or at least, no serious risks) world. Kids who didn’t even know each other would gather together at the park, organize games, hold hands, sing kumbaya, cooperate. It was always sunny and 72 degrees, the flowers were always blooming and somehow lemonade and ice cream showed up for free.

I guess maybe somebody lived childhoods like this, but it wasn’t the norm. Kids watched TONS of TV1, often were neglected by working parents2, bullying was rampant3 and adults rarely did anything about it, and rates of child injury and abuse were far higher than today. Nostalgia bias is an alluring thing. I’m not saying the “free play” don’t have many fair points about today’s highly structured and risk-averse childrearing environment4. In fact, I’m largely in sympathy with them (and recommend Peter Gray’s forthcoming Restoring Childhood which addresses some of these issues). Although, ironically, I observe many people seem to support “free play” with one side of their mouth, while supporting government censorship of media and technology or even book bans with the other5. I think what many adults mean by “free play” is not literally letting kids have the freedom to choose to entertain themselves how they want but rather to be forced into a utopio-retro vision of childhood that is long gone if it ever existed in the first place.

It’s important to remember that parents didn’t view parenting in the 70s and 80s as utopian either. Parents feared their kids were being peddled with drugs, lured by rock music into Satanism if they weren’t being outright kidnapped by Satanic cults, addicted to their “boob tubes”, turned into psychopaths by video games, and lured by lollipop toting sex offenders in paneled vans. Perhaps kids were “freer” but this was often a condition imposed upon them by being “latchkey”, that is unwatched by dual-income parents. And far from “free play” be an unalloyed good, who can forget all the “It’s 10pm…do you know where your child is?” PSAs from that era?

Share

It can seem like we’re in a bit of a doom loop. The anxieties of the 70s and 80s (kids aren’t supervised enough and the world is dangerous) have led us to the hyper-regulated school and parenting environments of today. This regulated childhood environment is now producing new adult anxieties that argue for a return to the 70s and 80s, now casting those times as ideal, despite few people who lived through them thinking of them as such at the time. I worry we’ll repeat this pattern over and over again unless we take a step back and figure out a balance that works best for kids. And that should be based in the best possible data, considered rigorously not…whatever the hell it is we’re doing now.

A lot is going right with today’s kids…they are far less violent, less likely to have unwanted pregnancies, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, more likely to stay in school and volunteer in their communities. Mental health is now improving according to CDC data (and youth mental health in the late 80s and 90s was very poor). This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t see what regulations we’ve placed on youth and on parents are doing more harm than good…I suspect many are. But we need to be sensible about it, not merely nostalgic.

The issue of breast vs bottle feeding has been part of the Mommy Wars for decades. Mothers want to make good, evidence-based decisions for their kids. At the same time, they are often placed under enormous social pressures to conform to a single way of doing things perceived as the “right” way to do things for themselves and their babies.

When it comes to breastfeeding, there’s a kind of moral intuition that breastfeeding would be better. After all, breastfeeding is natural and bottle feeding is…not. But this could also be the naturalistic fallacy. For instance, many modern synthetic medical interventions are superior to the natural plants or other biologicals they were based on.

My impression is that the intuition breast feeding is superior may lead us to assume mothers who decide to bottle feed are somehow lazy or selfish. Yet, many women struggle with breastfeeding, either in regards to milk production or constant pain and discomfort. Such difficulties may actually impede health and bonding outcomes if mothers are forbidden from making other choices. And some women, including single mothers or working mothers may blend bottle and breastfeeding to help with their schedules1.

Share

The problems for research are considerable. First, breastfeeding is often based in self-report. However, social pressure can cause confounding in self-report. Put simply: people tend to respond in socially desirable ways, even on anonymous surveys, in ways that make them look good. If those social pressures are higher for, say, higher income women, this can cause unreliability in answers that creates false correlations with good outcomes. There’s pretty good evidence breastfeeding tends to correlate with confounding variables such as mom’s IQ and social status, maternal health, parenting style, healthcare access, etc. Which means that sometimes when we conclude breastfeeding is beneficial, it may actually be these other things.

So the question remains…is breastfeeding really so superior that social pressure, shame and guilt are worth it for women who struggle with breastfeeding? Or is this another realm where naïve interpretations of p-values has done much mischief2.

We’ll have a look in three areas: the baby’s IQ, physical health via infections, and maternal bonding. My impression is that these three areas get a lot of attention with big claims about the benefits of breast feeding. They’re not the only potential outcomes, of course. But let’s see if the evidence holds up!

Read more

Thus began an epic journey that, whatever criticisms one might have of the United States, have resonated through world history. In its early years one might reasonably have been skeptical that the United States would rise beyond a second-rate power, but its population and geography grew exponentially and it came to dominate the western hemisphere. By the 20th century, the United States became pivotal to world history. The US’ late entry in WWI proved decisive in beating a resurgent Germany. In WW2 the US was critical in the alliance with its former English masters and soon-to-be Soviet rival in defeating the Germans (and Italians and Japanese) once again. In the latter half of the 20^th century, the US basically single-handedly held the tide against encroaching Communism.

Share

This doesn’t mean that the US has been perfect, but it has often learned from its moral failures. Slavery and segregation are terrible stains on US history. However, the US ditched slavery on its own, following a bloody civil war. The rejection of segregation was also a hard-fought but internal growth, leading to the US being one of the least racist cultures in history. Geographic growth often came at the expense of the Indian tribes already in North America (though many of them were no strangers to cruel territorial conflicts either).

Ben Franklin’s quote about the US being “A republic, if you can keep it” has often been a prophetical observation of the US’ ongoing strain. In my lifetime that has never seemed truer than today. We’ve had a remarkable string of “bad presidents” from both political parties, even as executive power has been increasing. Our congress is increasingly fickle, subservient, irrational, and unpopular. If our right-leaning Supreme Court has sometimes held the line on progressive overreach (affirmative action had long outlived its usefulness, and affirming sports and other spaces for biological females seems reasonable even if we otherwise respect trans people’s rights3), it too often defers to the president and seems increasingly aloof to the rights of private citizens.

Perhaps worst of all, money remains a driving force in our politics and our laws4. The courts have affirmed what looks like outright bribery by the rich and powerful as protected “speech” while increasingly yawning at actual government censorship in the name of “protecting the children.” Never in my life have I been so worried about speech rights in the US (though the UK and much of Europe is looking even worse).

But the US has seen deep challenges before and, with plenty of plodding and wrong turns, generally been able to right itself. I’m confident it will again.

I was only 5 back in 1976 when the US hit its 200^th birthday, so the event left little impression on me. I intend to rectify that this time around. Only July 3^rd, my son and I are taking in a celebratory river cruise and will see the Young Washington movie. On the 4^th, a family BBQ is in the offering, and I hope to check out some fireworks if it’s not too crowded. I hope your 4^th will be pleasant and fun as well.

We can find things to gripe about, but in the end I feel blessed to have been born in the US at this time in history. May we hope for 250 more years of adventure and progress.

I suspect that, decades ago, a kind of “received wisdom” academic culture evolved around assigning the take-home essay. Presumably, the rationale was either than they gave students an opportunity to improve their writing1, or provided some kind of “deep” learning that was different from what one could achieve via the lecture to objective (i.e., multiple choice2) test pipeline. Not assigning some kind of take-home writing was socially frowned upon: it was the sign of the lazy, unserious professor who was not challenging their students enough. So, we largely ended up with a thoughtless engine sometimes joked about as “Psychology class in a box”: 3 objective tests and a take-home essay.

Such essays have never been popular with students. I loathed them when I was a college undergraduate. My students today routinely refer to take-home assignments as “busywork” meaning they aren’t connecting them to higher learning or anything else useful. Some form of cheating on them has always been part of the landscape. Discussions of plagiarism go back forever, CliffNotes have helped book essays take form without, you know, actually reading the book for much of the 20^th century, and the advent of Wikipedia3 in 2001 caused much heartburn among professors.

The advent of AI systems brings up a new challenge. Plagiarism could be kept in check through deterrence. Ironically, AI created sophisticated plagiarism detection systems that could, in many cases, definitively link a copied paper to the source material, providing irrefutable proof of plagiarism. Though AI detection systems are also available, they are probabilistic, not definitive. They can suggest that AI may or even probably were used but not definitively. There are concerns that such systems may unfairly discriminate against non-native speakers, or students with autism, etc.

As a consequence, and in fear of lawsuits, most colleges do not routinely provide professors with AI detection systems. No detection means no deterrence. Now every take-home essay could be written with AI and there’s not much we professors can do about that. With no deterrence, it’s just human nature that we’ll get more of the behavior.

That’s particularly true when students already hate the assignments and see little worth in them. But could it be that they’re right?

Share

I’ll stop here and say, some professors have designed wonderful, well-thought-out take home assignments, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. But I suspect many truly are “busywork”, or at very least reflect a professor’s idea of what is valuable without necessarily considering what the student might actually benefit from.

If we think back to K12 even, most of us can remember some truly excellent take-home projects into which we poured our hearts and souls. But we can also remember hordes of boring, awful assignments that advanced our learning only minimally (the whole topic of homework in K12 is its own controversy).

I’ll admit that, even as a professor, reading student essays is one of the worst parts of the job (faculty meetings being right up there as well). Now, granted, college teaching isn’t coal mining or sewer work, so “worst part of the job” is relativistic, perhaps like trying to identify what’s the worst part of the job of being Santa’s elves. But reading a bunch of bad, boring writing is not the strong suit of a sub-clinical ADHD person like myself.

The sort of “basic” take-home essay in the social sciences is probably something like: pick a topic relevant to the class and write a 5-page literature review citing at least 5 scholarly sources. You can jazz this up in various ways…increase the page count (10 becomes particularly torturous for students) and citation count. I liked having students pick a controversial topic and cite sources from both sides to get a wider view. But, if I’m being honest, it’s not compelling reading under the best of times, and I doubt the students find it to be compelling writing. And, of course, this type of paper is easily offloaded to AI.

But maybe that basic lit-review assignment stinks anyway? I did a quick search (this is not my area so entirely possible I missed some important work…let me know if you know!), but there seemed to be surprisingly little data on the basic question: “Do take-home essays improve student learning?” The best source I could find was this meta-analysis, which covers K-college. There are some nuances here, but the take-away was that out-of-class writing assignments have virtually zero (d = .194) impact on student learning.

But maybe writing assignments improve writing itself? Sadly, again the answer seems to be “not much”. This study found only a 0.3 improvement over time on a 4-point rating scale. We can try to shine the apple as much as we want (“small but statistically significant”), but I think all that naïve p-value interpretation just obscures an uncomfortable conclusion: rote writing has very little practical impact on students.

Share

To be fair, I think there’s still an argument that a good and highly engaging take-home assignment could have a different impact. One thing I’ve done more recently in my Media and Behavior class is ask students to examine AI writing itself. I had my students pick a controversial/morally valenced topic in media and behavior like “Do thin ideal models on television cause anorexia nervosa” and prompt an AI LLM like ChatGPT to write a college essay on that topic. Then I asked them to prompt the AI LLM again with something akin to “But isn’t it true that many studies don’t come to the conclusions you mention in the first essay?” (whatever the first essay had said) and, following that, ask the AI LLM to write the essay again accordingly. Students were then asked to do two things…first, using a handwritten report, discuss the differences between the two AI essays and, second, in another handwritten response, check the references to make sure they actually existed and were represented fairly.

At least with a handwritten response, even if the students used AI to assist them, they still had to write it and maybe absorbed something. But students wrote, in their anonymous end-of-semester evaluations5, that they actually liked this assignment. It was exciting because it opened their eyes to something…that AI LLMs are often full of crap, and that the references they produce may or may not even exist. There was a least a dollop of actual take-home value in the assignment that meant something for other aspects of their lives6.

In effect, I was teaching them how to responsibly use AI, but also giving them a chance to write. I’m not saying this is the perfect assignment (and I’ll admit I’m pondering how to make it more rigorous), but the students actually had some fun, learned a practically useful lesson, and (perhaps most importantly), I actually enjoyed reading their responses.

My point is not that take-home writing is dead, but maybe it’s high time we ponder what it was supposed to be for in the first place. I believe assigning students writing became a kind of social etiquette for college professors. And I think a lot of the current narrative around it has more to do with the frustration that a kind of hazing process has been undone. A lot of old people (college professors included) seem to just want to turn the screws on the kids. We mask that around a lot of talk of learning, improving writing, or even personal growth, but most take-home writing is the academic equivalent of making cult recruits walk on glass7.

The best take home assignments are the ones that actually engage students. Give them an assignment they find fascinating, a problem they can solve, a thing they can create. Something where they can put some of themselves into the project rather than just vomit back a reflection on Salinger or summarizing 5-10 academic articles. These might be longer, deeper assignments, but also perhaps with more flexibility for the student to design their response. Sure, not every horse is going to drink from the stream, but my suspicion (backed by some of the nuances in that meta-analysis), is that this will work better than much of what we’re doing now.

So, yes, AI is killing the routine take-home essay. But death may be what it deserved all along. That doesn’t mean we can’t develop good, engaging, thoughtful take-home assignments8 Students may always use AI to assist them and, like the calculator, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We can require handwritten or physical products to prevent complete offloading. And work harder to consider projects students will want to do rather than have to do.

But then again, this would require professors to abandon the performative clothes-rending I suspect has nothing to do with student learning anyway.

Back somewhere in 2014, a 3-year-old boy made a classic, rookie mistake: running with scissors. This ended the way every kindergarten teacher warns us about: the scissors firmly in his eye socket, penetrating his brain. Fortunately, his injury seemed to resolve miraculously in the ER and, at least according to the medical report, he suffered no immediately evident neurological problems.

Kids are always doing dangerous things. Running with scissors. Running near the pool (sometimes just after having eaten!). Sitting too close to the TV screen (is that even a thing anymore). Sticking their tongues on freezing metal poles in winter. As kids we’re often warned against doing these things: Don’t run with scissors! But do kids listen?

Sadly, there do not appear to be dedicated scissor-injury statistics stretching back to the 1800s giving us even correlational data about scissor injuries over time. Overall, deaths due to unintended injuries/accidents for young children has fallen at least since the 1980s. It’s hard to know why though…is it due to scolding grandmothers and teachers? Is it because products like scissors are now made for kids with safety in mind (think of those blunt, rubber-covered useless scissors they give young kids), or are nervous (and shamed) parents simply bubble-wrapping their kids, keeping them from exploring the outside world at all?

Share

Undoubtedly, kids are safer than they were in the 1970s, when I can remember my grandparents letting me stand in the backseat of their car (I was a small kid), arms on the couch-like front seat, yakking to them as they drove. Though now, in the spirit of “you can’t ever win” many adults today are lamenting all that safety1. Surely, parents are more neurotic and shamed than ever, unable to let their kids into even the front lawn without some kind of Lost in Space robot guardian with them at all time (though even that would be criticized as too much screen time). We now have grumpy adults arguing kids aren’t doing enough underaged drinking and sexing.

Subscribe now

But I digress. Does all this warning kids about the dangers of this or that actually work? The answer seems to be no. Kids can learn safety material, recite the mantras, get items on quizzes right. But they don’t apply it in real life. Basically, you can tell kids to stop, drop and roll, but when you test them by setting them on fire (hey, how else are you going to test them?), they run around screaming like everyone else.

For instance, you can tell kids about gun safety. Basically: if you find a gun left in your house by the Gun Fairy, don’t touch it and tell and adult. Then, when the kids are tested by putting them in a room with a real gun (but no real bullets, scientists aren’t psychopaths, or maybe it’s just the IRBs that get in the way of the real fun), they start trying to shoot each other with it just fine (remembering the behavior of some of my early classmates, maybe some of these kids are purposefully trying to settle some scores).

Even with fire safety, big promises are made by activists groups and policy makers promoting them, but outcomes look modest to me (even when parents are involved in developing safety plans). Part of the problem, too, is you can’t cause real fires in participating families’ homes to see how they do (those damn IRBs again!), so we’re never really sure how well outcomes work in practice.

Share

So, most gains, I suspect, come not from teaching kids safety, but simply making the world safer. Kids are now strapped into child seats, not allowed to stand in the back row2 of a Buick Century. Preschool scissors are practically made of Jello. Parents are nearly at the point of inserting RFID tags in their kids before letting them into the yard or playground3. The American Academy of Pediatrics has made it’s own brave stance against bouncy houses, but a world without bouncy houses is not one I want to live in.

But going all in on safety can come with its own downsides. Parents become neurotic and forced to navigate their children’s wishes for autonomy versus societal shame for granting them just that. Youth are robbed of a multitude of adventurous experiences. And we’re all forced to listen to GenXers wave their canes at the sky about how much better things were in the 1970s and 1980s (narrator: “Things were not better in the 1970s and 1980s”)4.

It’s a morbid calculus isn’t it: how many lives do we balance against an increasingly restrictive childhood?

Which brings me to the current narrative. You don’t have to go long without seeing someone clutching pearls over a “generation in crisis” over their mental health, or some grouchy college professor complaining college kids today can’t read. In a very Dothraki sense it is known that the youth of today have more anxieties, worse attention, hell can’t order from a menu (here’s Freya India suggesting 80% of GenZ have anxiety ordering from a restaurant menu1). But…what if, like the narcissism epidemic,…none of this ever happened2.

Share

Most of our beliefs about a mental health crisis come from self-report data. But such data is notoriously unreliable. Diagnostic criteria change, language changes, stigma changes, incentives changes…tracking self-report over time can introduce a ton of error. As Michael Sheeringa has pointed out, false positives in self-report data of mental health are very common, particularly with the dodgy, non-clinical surveys used in most studies. By contrast, cross-national suicide data have never pointed to there being any “epidemic” of, at least, serious mental health crises among teens. Teen suicide did increase in the US during the 2010s, but middle-aged adult suicides went up even higher at the same time. Looking at teen suicides in isolation and blaming phones rather than acknowledging it as an intergenerational issue primarily targeting middle-aged adults was one of the greatest missed opportunities of mental health policy in the 2010s. Fortunately, even in the US, youth suicides have been going down the last few years, accompanied by reductions in self-reported serious mental health symptoms according to CDC data. So even in the US, the “crisis” such as it was, appears to have reversed.

But was this “crisis” isolated in the US, or was it a cross-national generational crisis? Two new studies suggest that perhaps, after all, there hasn’t been any “crisis” of youth mental health nor any indication that, contrary to every teacher and college professor’s griping, that attention has become more impaired in recent generations.

The first study by Vekety and colleagues, now in press at Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review used studies of the standardized Child Behavior Checklist over time, rather than self-report to examine rates of youth mental health problems. The second study by Andrzejewski and colleagues examined scores on a standardized test of attention and cognition over time. Both avoid the pitfalls of clumsy self-report. Both reach the same conclusion: Youth today are doing about as well as ever. There is no crisis of youth mental health or cognition. Let’s have a quick look at the two studies.

Read more

The evidence is less clear than the story would suggest. Perhaps the most interesting argument, by Dr. Jared Horvath, the expert mentioned above, is that the timing of state-by-state adoption of EdTech is associated with immediate declines in standardized testing scores. But an examination of his evidence reveals immediate concerns. In Horvath’s testimony, he mentions something happening about 2010, but his state-level analyses employ a wide range of years, from 2011-2018. His definition regarding the adoption of tech appears vague and focused significantly on computerized testing mandates. This raises the issue that, in good faith, data may have been fit post-hoc to tell a story, rather than rigorous analysis1. His graphs also employ zoomed-in Y-axes to make changes appear more dramatic than they actually are a common manipulative technique.

To illustrate the unreliability of this method, Horvath selects 2018 for Alabama as the “inflection point” although widespread use of Chromebooks didn’t begin until two years later, 2020, and even then in only some districts. Connecticut is listed as 2014 for the “inflection point” but didn’t begin giving out Chromebooks to all students until 6 years later, 2020. This points to serious mismatches between the “inflection point” and presumed causes of any decline. An effect cannot come before the cause, but that’s what we’re faced with in much of the data. Further, just eyeballing graphs is not sufficient evidence for such as strong causal statement. There’s not even really correlational evidence here. People are just looking at a trend and declaring, “Technology happened somewhere in there!”

Share

Further, there’s no good evidence to suggest IQs have dropped among GenZ. The Flynn Effect, or the observation that IQs tended to increase in each generation during the 20^th century, documented a remarkable human advancement. Most of this likely reflected better maternal health and nutrition rather than schools. The Flynn Effect appears to have stabilized in recent generations (not just GenZ) very likely because peak potential has been reached.

Further weakening this argument, the reverse in the Flynn effect began long before the EdTech movement, and happened for all age categories, not just kids. The lead author of this study has likewise cautioned against is misinterpretation saying it doesn’t mean Americans are less intelligent, “It doesn’t mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it’s just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples,”

Other studies have suggested that in the US, IQs have continued to rise, although some Scandinavian countries have seen modest declines. This is usually explained as a wealth/health optimization effect, not one due to EdTech, and has been observed prior to the EdTech movement (i.e., the late 1990s).

Misunderstanding the Data

Aside from considerable unclarity regarding the temporal order of these modest cognitive changes and any EdTech movement, most of the data suggest only the tiniest of changes over time. For instance, US standardized testing scores (the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP) suggest only modest declines. Interestingly, far from indicating a unique period of decline, scores have simply returned to their 1990s levels, with peak years ironically consistent with the rise of social media and smartphones.

For instance, 8^th grade math scores are slightly above 1990 levels.

Reading scores are only marginally below those from 1990.

Outcomes are similar for 4^th graders, with math slightly above 1990s levels and reading about the same. Notice, too, the changes are quite modest. These graphs are produced by the NAEP data portal. These still zoom in the Y-axis, exaggerating changes, but even with this they are clearly modest. Main drops appear to have occurred post-covid.

Today’s math scores are slightly higher than the pre-tech 1990s, with reading about the same. Even if we look at the decline from peak years, around 2013-2019, and assume any decline was due to EdTech, not Covid, these declines are about 8-9 points. Most kids’ scores naturally range within 100 points or so, so these are pretty small changes. Crunching some back-of-the envelope statistics, across those years from 2017 or so to 2024, time explains about 2-3% of the variance in student scores. That’s a real but not alarming drop, mostly timed to the pandemic.

Share

Similar claims are often made about international student tests. While scores on the PISA (the international equivalent of the NAEP) have declined modestly post-covid, that seems mainly true for Europe. By contrast, high tech-adopting Asian countries such as Japan or South Korea have seen increasing scores.

Data From Research

Much of the debate over EdTech has raged without much actual consideration of evidence. Experiments regarding the impact of EdTech suggest modest gains, not deficits from its use. For instance, one meta-analysis of experiments of elementary school students found that the use of EdTech produced small literacy gains. Other analyses largely agree across age categories, with the caveat that smart, targeted employment works better than knee-jerk throwing random technology at kids without a plan.

There’s a reasonable case to be made that the promises of EdTech were overblown. These positive effects are very small, possibly small enough to be statistical noise or at least of limited practical value. But in his testimony, Horvath stated “…most general-use educational technologies perform below the effectiveness of ordinary classroom instruction.” This is simply false, as ordinary teaching was already controlled in those experiments.

Conclusions

Compared to some utopian claims about EdTech revolutionizing learning, gains have been modest at best. However, dystopian claims of an educational catastrophe are not evidence based. Rather they appear similar to other media and technology moral panics, ranging from radio, to comic books, to television (often called the boob toob when introduced), to video games, to rock music2.

There remains little reason to believe that EdTech is even correlated with let alone causing a learning deficit, let alone hysterical claims of IQ declines. Overall, changes in learning appear to be slight over time, and kids today are still learning at or better than kids from the pre-internet 1990s.

We’ve got to learn that the Digital Abstinence Movement is rarely based in good evidence. Tragically, panicking over EdTech will likely distract society from the real problems with schools, notably that teens tell us they are a toxic mixture of stressful and boring. Scourging schools of EdTech won’t make them better and will only delay serious efforts to improve them.

A new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan attempts to answer this. Dr. Whelan told me he was specifically inspired by Haidt’s 2024 claims and sought to examine them rigorously and in the context of other regrets. This is a great use of science…testing dramatic public claims. So…do they hold up?

In Dr. Whelan’s study, 389 young adult participants (20-24) who were social media users as teens were asked about their regrets regarding their teenage years. A list of 20 possible teenage regrets was asked of all participants, with degree of regret marked on a 7-point Likert scale. This is an interesting design…testing social media regrets against other possible regrets, putting them in better context than the crude survey Haidt relied on.

So how did social media regrets hold up? Out of 20 possible regrets, too much time on social media ranked 13^th. The top regrets were 1.) not sticking up for oneself, 2.) being too self-conscious, 3.) not documenting memories, 4.) not learning practical life skills and 5.) not getting help with mental health. Girls were slightly more likely to regret time on social media than boys (ranking 11^th vs 13^th) though this effect was very small (I estimated it at about r = .11) so hardly the big “vulnerable girls” narrative some have peddled.

Share

Further, regrets over time spent on social media as a teen did not predict current young adult life satisfaction for either boys or girls. Thus such regrets may be more a symptom of current panics over social media than anything of actual life importance2. Of the regrets, only not working harder in school and not exercising negatively predicted young adult life satisfaction. Interestingly, having regrets over socializing with friends positively predicted life satisfaction.

As Dr. Whelan noted in his study, “The objective of this study was to critically examine the commonly held belief that social media use during teenage years is a significant source of regret and a predictor of diminished well-being in early adulthood…Contrary to dominant narratives in the public domain, our results suggest that regrets over time spent on social media are not among the most potent regrets reported by young adults…As such, these results align with prior research indicating that the harmful effects of social media may be overstated.”

I don’t think study is necessarily perfect. Asking people about social media use during a moral panic is likely to prime inflated “regret” stats. Retrospective analyses naturally carry some risk of bias. But I do think these findings directly (and more robustly) address the claims made in Haidt’s NYT oped, and caution us that we should probably apply a bit more critical thinking to this issue.

My impression is that even many critics of social media bans bought the line that teens themselves were worried about social media effects. Increasingly, such broad claims appear, like so much else from this current moral panic, to be untrue or at least more nuanced. Perhaps we all need to better learn not to take what appears in a NYT oped piece to be the gospel truth.

Honestly, I’m not entirely unsympathetic either. Being a parent is tough, controlling young children is a Sisyphean task, and the angry glares of other adults must be stressful. I’ve sometimes wondered if a “family section” to planes might not be an unreasonable answer to this. I could see it as, essentially, the cheap seats where you pay bargain basement prices and, in doing so, lose any right to complain about screaming children near you. Those willing to shell out a few bucks get the halcyon seats, I guess probably closer to the front of the plane.

Expressing this on social media usually invites responses of “You monster!” or the accusation that one is contributing to global depopulation by finding screaming hordes of teething children to be anything other than precious angels. But, it seems, maybe I’m not so alone. A new survey suggests a majority of people (75%)…including a solid majority of parents themselves(79%!) believe children should be excluded from restaurants, at least in some conditions. There are definitely nuances to this…nobody’s trying to kick kids out of McDonald’s, but essentially, later evening, higher concept dining would be more adults only.

Share

When it was released the survey got all the usual howls on social media, but I think they’re kind of on to something. Among flyers, those crying babies aren’t popular either, with the little devils ranking only below seat kicking as the top annoyance of flying. I get the naysayers’ concerns…it’s already stressful being a parent, and some time out in public can be nice. Buuuuut…I generally think the impetus is on the individual causing the disturbance to try to lessen it rather than everyone else to suck it up.

Which is why I think finding some modest compromises could be useful. Specific sections on planes for families doesn’t prevent families from traveling. Having family hours at restaurants doesn’t prevent parents from dining with their kids (but perhaps if you’re going to Maison Lumière, hiring a babysitter isn’t a bad idea?) If you’ve got five unruly kids, maybe Burger King is fine.

Like many issues, this is one where some kind of social compromise is possible. It would help if people didn’t aggressively stake out inflexible moral positions in public. Alas…as with so many things, if only.

Share

First, clearly universities have a problem with grade inflation2. The proportion of Harvard’s A grades rose from something like 25% in 2005 to about 60% today. This is accompanied with other silly stories such as the 55-way tie for top GPA awards at Harvard when, in prior years, only one or two students would typically win.

The interesting thing is that grade inflation is obviously nothing new, having begun in the 1960s. Can’t blame this one on the phones. It seems to have begun in the 1960s and continued apace since then.

I think, obviously, there is a very real problem. I think we can reject out of hand the notion that current generations of students are suddenly geniuses3. And though problems may be particularly acute at Harvard and similar Ivy leagues, this probably presents some general problems across universities.

The reasons for this 20-year trend are likely many. Universities have become increasingly bureaucratized and “customer” focused. Allowing student evaluations of teaching to drive faculty job retention and tenure decisions fairly obviously makes faculty wary of pissing students off with low (but perhaps deserved) grades. Everything from Wikipedia to AI4 has torpedoed the robustness of take-home writing assignments (which maybe weren’t great anyway, a topic I may return to).

But so, yes, probably something needed to be done about grade inflation. The trouble is, of course, if one university drops grades, those students may find themselves disadvantaged against students from other universities that don’t. So, Harvard leading the way is a good thing.

At the same time, a % cap is rather crude and, in that sense, students have a point. Why 20%...not 10% or 30%? Is it absolutely impossible that more than 20% of students could obtain mastery in a topic area? Are these grade caps really tied to student learning, or are they just optics to please the general public? I suspect the latter.

Ideally, individual professors would develop an idea of what counts as different levels of mastery for a particular course5. These should be set levels…rigorous to be sure…but achievable by any who put in sustained effort. Different professors may have different notions for what counts as mastery, and different courses might produce different breakdowns of grades. Some courses might have a fairly high proportion of As, whereas others may have none whatsoever. In either case, arguably there should be some sense that the grading was tied to reasonable outcomes and fair. Hypothetically, think about a class in say, airline piloting. True, we’d want a program to weed out the incompetent, but by the time of graduation (for those who aren’t failed out), wouldn’t we want all pilots to be As? Who wants to fly with the C- pilot? On the other hand, perhaps with a course in unsolvable math problems, we’d expect no As whatsoever, assuming all the problems remain unsolved?

Share

An alternative system could use means and standard deviations to create a competitive grading culture. I’m less sure that this works, as it may ironically assign high grades to some who are undeserving (if no students obtain mastery) or unfairly punish the worst of the best (if most all students obtain mastery). Further, if early students drop out, the severity of the curve changes over the life of the course6.

Ultimately, grade caps are understandable, but feel a bit unserious. They seem like throwing red meat to the masses while avoiding any serious consideration of what academic grades are supposed to reflect. How might we get to the latter? Here’s what I suggest:

· Student evaluations of teaching should largely be dropped from faculty evaluations. If faculty receive hordes of complaints, that might be different, but overall SETs produce perverse incentives7.

· Faculty should be incentivized financially for innovative, creative, rigorous teaching.

· Campus bureaucrats should largely get out of the way. Faculty don’t need more trainings, committees, focus groups, etc. They need more time and incentive to think about teaching.

· To some degree we may need to reconceptualize research as well. As of now, faculty burn all kinds of time on least publishable units to get tenure, grants and promotions. Maybe it would be better to slow things down and rebalance teaching and research, with slower more rigorous research as well as more considered teaching.

· Out-of-class assignments need to be reconceived. The take home essay is dead. I’m skeptical blue books8 or oral exams fixes this.

· Applied test questions are better than standard info questions, particularly for any online tests. ChatGPT is pretty clever.

· Faculty need to feel their chairs and deans have their back in the face of student grade complaints. This should be the default. Administration overturning grades should occur only when gross bias or negligence can be demonstrated.

· Accrediting bodies and school rankings should reconsider retention as an indicator of success. This can create perverse incentives for universities to retain every student, however incompetent. Fairness and rigor should replace retention as a metric.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, of course. But I don’t think we’re there yet. So far, too much of the conversation feels a bit unserious, where simply making things harder by default is considered a success9. I think the tell here is so much of the conversation is worrying over “grade inflation” as opposed to student learning. This is the “turn the screws” approach, where students being unhappy is considered a marker of success as opposed to student learning. Perhaps one day we’ll get there but, in the meantime, I suspect grade caps are just an optical bandaid.

Share

If true, this would prove unnerving news to people simultaneously fans of Christmas travel and food and not fans of cancer. But we’re being constantly warned in news media that burnt toast, drinking hot beverages including hot water, cellphones, and a variety of other common household objects or food are dangerous. The World Health Organization famously placed bacon alongside plutonium as a cause for cancer. Apparently, pretty much everything causes cancer except, conveniently, reading scary news articles about things causing cancer. Evidence suggests that the frequency of scary-sounding news headlines has increased. And it’s possible this may mirror issues in science…a plethora of weak science studies scrabbling for attention by making big, scary claims.

Scarmongering is as old as humanity, but data tells us it’s getting worse as more desperate news outlets compete more fiercely for our finite attention. News reporters have less expertise to evaluate press releases from scientists. Modern life has changed at an accelerated pace, causing more anxieties as we are required to adapt to faster change. As one recent analysis of this phenomenon put it, “Crisis coverage seems to reflect not so much the problems society faces, but society’s identity, priorities, and outlook on the world.”

Below is just a partial example of issues people have been told to panic over the last 25 years. Some of these have elements of truth but were greatly hyped. Others proved to be largely fabricated or untrue.

A full list would be far, far longer.

Share

The issue of crisis framing is not new. In the late 80s and early 90s the “Satanic Panic” belief that devil cults were kidnapping, abusing and murdering children was promoted by news media, politicians, some clinicians and scholars, and even Oprah Winfrey1. The reports were largely false but resulted in the imprisonment of several innocent people alongside needless rattling parents for years. But has this gotten worse?

Evidence suggests yes. Scientific analysis of news headlines from 2000-2019 finds that the language in headlines has steadily gotten more negative and emotional, focused on disgust, fear, anger, etc. As the authors of that report wrote, “Financial incentives to maximize click-through ratios could be at play in increasing the sentiment polarity and emotional charge of headlines over time. Conceivably, the temptation of shaping the sentiment and emotional undertones of news headlines to advance political agendas could also be playing a role.”

In some cases, there may be a kernel of truth to an issue. Pumping pollution into the atmosphere is probably bad, even if the worst climate doomerism is off the mark. Eating a balanced diet and avoiding junk food is probably good even if panic-mongering about ultra-processed foods is unhelpful and confusing.

But in others, the panic has proven to be wrong or fabricated. Some of these can seem strange in retrospect, such as the notion massive networks of Satanists are kidnapping babies, that various new technologies from microwave ovens to 5G are killing us, to supposed waves of new, novel crimes such that gang members are putting dirty syringes into gas pump handles, or killing anyone who returns a high beam headlight flash.

Publish and Perish

Publishing research is the lifeblood of academic survival for many scientists. But some academics worry the emphasis has increasingly focused on weaker studies, “least publishable units” as they are called, but which have to compete for resources and potential grant funding, often using news headlines to garner attention. With health risks, news media tend to prefer sensationalist risks and exaggerating claims in a university press release increases the odds that a study will get news coverage.

Unfortunately, this attention-grabbing trend has been coupled with significant issues in the quality of science research. Many fields such as psychology, cancer research, and even physics, have experienced mass replication failures, over the past decade, suggesting a lack of rigor in 21^st century research. Some, such as Alzheimer’s research, appear to have wasted decades into fruitless research and fraud.

Academic publishing has surged in recent years, including fraudulent papers, but also many that are legitimate, but of low quality. In an unusual twist for the publishing world, scholars are often asked to pay “article processing fees” to publish, in effect paying to do their job. Getting the focus of newspaper headlines may be seen as a return on investment, pushing scientists to make grander claims than their data may truly permit.

What Motivates the Push to Panic?

People are quite right to be wary of big companies, whether technology companies, or big oil, or food industries. These exist to make profits, not to be primarily concerned with our welfare. But we often forget that fear is a selling point too. And industries can spring up to profit off that worry.

Read more

It wasn’t always that way. Coach travel of the 1950s and 60s was much more luxurious, with wider seats2, more legroom3, and decent meals on real china. It was also more expensive, in fairness. The wise guru Google Gemini estimates that Orlando to Spokane route would have cost (in today’s dollars) about $1240 in coach. Today the same route would be between $300-500 (though going up as gas prices soar).

I still remember my first flight…a solo trip to Hawaii in 1990 I’d saved up for for years. It was a long flight, but not at all uncomfortable. The seat between myself and another customer was empty and there was plenty of room to stretch out and decent food. I remember my row mate getting up to smoke4 and disappearing to some lounge for hours, leaving the row to me. It really wasn’t bad.

Now, even short flights are agony. This appears to be by design. Lots has been written about how the business model for main carriers like Delta has focused on premium class customers, deliberately trying to squeeze customers out of coach by making it as miserable as possible. Seats are getting narrower, ensuring those elbows in your ribs. Legroom is ridiculous even for a short dude like me. Amenities such as even basic drink and snack service are getting pared back. People sometimes talk about the enshittification of products, but air travel appears to be the best example.

Read more

Predictably, these results sent advocates for bans trying to squeeze soup from a stone…particularly around those near-zero mental health effects, but at least on the surface, this study is very bad news, indeed for cellphone ban fans. It supports the narrative that they are largely ineffective.

There are some reasonable criticisms of the study though. First, it’s unpublished and I really don’t like this trend of unpublished economic studies getting widespread “cold fusion” style news coverage without peer review (not that peer review is great at stopping bad studies from being published). Second, the best critique I’ve seen of the study from cellphone ban fans is that it only examines one policy…Youndr type pouches2, not bans more generally. I think that’s a fair observation. Third, the study appears to pull data from a lot of different sources, which I think can be a significant source of error. Fourth, I think the difference-in-differences method the authors use is vastly oversold and too fragile to researcher choices and assumptions. And, last, the authors too often fall for a naïve interpretation of p-values when the underlying effect sizes such as for mental health, suggest a null interpretation would be more appropriate.

Share

This is actually one of the surprising things about the paper though. Speaking frankly, I perceive these authors as being in a habit of misrepresenting weak data inappropriately. One of their studies on social media restriction was too often sold as evidence for benefits of such an approach, when the effect size was so close to zero as actually to better support the opposite conclusion3. But that’s what’s rather remarkable here…even with authors who, and I’m not implying bad faith, have some evidence biases that tend to put the thumb on the scale in favor of anti-tech narratives, this is a big bunch of nothing.

That didn’t stop at least one of them from still defending cellphone bans. Study coauthor Thomas Dee told journalist Alexander Russo he was concerned the coverage might cause people to “jump to the conclusion that phone bans aren’t a good idea.” He also told journalists it would be “wrong for policymakers to see the results as a reason to shy away from restrictions.” Where else do you find researchers run a study that finds a policy doesn’t work yet still stump for that policy? During moral panics, critical thinking can be pretty low.

I don’t think this one study will be the end of the debate of course. I have it on good authority another economist paper that made some headlines last fall in support of bans when it was unpublished is now searching for more press attention as it gets published. As I wrote, that study actually provided better evidence against bans than for them, due to near-zero effect sizes, but in this climate, watch for advocates to ignore that in favor of more naïve interpretation of “statistical significance” from p-values rather than effect sizes.

Meanwhile, more studies are finding such bans don’t work, yet those studies tend to get less news attention. Be alert for more moral panic shenanigans before people come to their senses.