from the look-at-the-actual-evidence-folks dept
Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel good, because it gives them something to blame for lots of really difficult things happening with kids today.
The fact that it’s wrong and the data don’t support the actual claims is of no matter. It feels like it could be right, and that’s much easier than doing the real and extremely difficult work of actually preparing kids for the modern world.
So what happens when an actual expert confronts Haidt on this?
Earlier this year, we had Dr. Candice Odgers on our podcast. Unlike Haidt, she is an actual expert in this field and has been doing research on the issue for years. The podcast was mostly to talk about what the research actually shows, rather than just “playing off Haidt’s” misleading book. However, Odgers has become the go-to responder to Haidt’s misleading moral panic. She’s great at it (though there are a ton of other experts in the field who also point out that Haidt’s claims are not supported by evidence).
Still, Odgers keeps getting called on by publications to respond to Haidt’s claims. She’s done so in Nature, where she highlighted what the research actually shows, and in The Atlantic, where she explained how Haidt’s supported proposals might actually cause real harm to kids.
Many people have been wondering if Haidt and Odgers (who were at UVA at the same, Odgers as a grad student, Haidt as a professor) would have a chance to debate directly, and that finally happened recently during a session hosted by UVA. This gave them a chance to discuss what the research says directly. I recommend watching the whole discussion, which is an hour and a half long, though most of the discussion on the research comes in the first half.
What came across to me, and which Haidt admits at the very end, is that Odgers knows the research in this space better than anyone, and she wasn’t going to let Haidt get away with making broad generalizations not supported by the data. Here’s a snippet of her responding to Haidt insisting that the research supports his position, including that he was seeing the same thing across the Western world. But Odgers points out that’s not what the research shows:
She also suggests that Haidt’s problem is that he has a story and then went back searching for data to support it. Rather than going in and seeing what the data actually says:
Haidt jumps in to insist you don’t need a pre-existing hypothesis to find something. This is technically true because of course you can sometimes find something that way. But also, it is kind of a big deal right now, given the replication crisis which started in Haidt’s own field of psychology. The crisis was brought on by researchers hunting through data to try to prove something. This is why pre-registered studies are increasingly so important. So having Haidt just act like not having a hypothesis initially seems pretty tone deaf.
Similarly, I’ll note that Haidt frequently jumps between arguments that aren’t directly connected. When asked about evidence on mental health, he talks instead about things like sextortion and catfishing. Obviously, being a victim of those kinds of attacks and abuses can impact mental health, but that’s still a much smaller part of the issue and isn’t directly related to the larger issue of scrolling on social media and how it impacts mental health.
There’s a lot more in the discussion, but I’m really hoping that more people recognize that Haidt’s position doesn’t seem to really be supported by the evidence. Watching Odgers confront him is enlightening, but too few people will see it. Instead, politicians, parents, and school administrators are all acting as though Haidt has it all figured out. Mostly because it absolves them of having to do the hard work of teaching kids how to use these tools appropriately.
Filed Under: candice odgers, jonathan haidt, mental health, moral panic, social media, teens, the anxious generation
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
from the wait-why? dept
Get ready for some more unexpected uses of the world’s most controversial facial recognition tech. Clearview has amassed a 10-billion-image database — not through painstaking assembly but by sending its bots out into the open web to download images (and any other personal info it can find). It then sells access to this database to whoever wants it, even if Clearview or the end users are breaking local laws by using it.
Not for nothing do other facial recognition tech firms continue to distance themselves from Clearview. But none of this matters to Clearview — not its pariah status, not the lawsuits brought against it, nor the millions of dollars in fines and fees it has racked up around the world.
Here’s why none of this matters to Clearview: government entities still want its product, even if that means being tainted by association. While we know spies and cops similarly don’t care what “civilians” think about them or their private contractors, we kind of expect some government agencies to show some restraint. But as we’ve seen in the past, “have you no shame?” tends to earn a shrug at best and a “no” at worst.
Clearview is relatively cheap. And no other tech firm can compete with the size of its web-scraped database. So we get really weird stuff, like the IRS, US Postal Service, FDA, and NASA buying access to Clearview’s tech.
The IRS has always been an early adopter of surveillance tech. The origin of the steady drip of Stingray info began with an IRS investigation in the early 2000s. The Postal Service claims its Clearview use pertains to investigations of burgled mail or property damage to postal buildings/equipment. NASA hasn’t bothered to explain why it needs Clearview. But it bought a short-term license in 2021. And, as Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media, it (following taking a two-year break) purchased another Clearview license two months ago.
While it would make sense NASA might employ some sort of facial recognition tech (or other biometric scanner) to ensure secure areas remain secure, what’s needed there is one-to-one matching. Clearview offers 1-to-10 billion matching, which would make zero sense if NASA just needs to ensure solid matches to keep unauthorized personnel out of certain areas.
The twist to this purchase is that it doesn’t belong directly to NASA, so to speak. It belongs to its oversight.
Now, that makes a little more sense. But if the investigation involves unauthorized access to facilities or equipment, it still seems like a one-to-one solution would do better at generating positives and negatives without increasing the chance of a false match.
If there’s something else going on at NASA that involves non-NASA personnel doing stuff at NASA (or committing crimes on NASA property), then Clearview would make more sense, but only in the sense that it isn’t limited to one-to-one searches. Any other product would do the same job without NASA having to put money in Clearview’s pockets. But at $16,000, it’s safe to assume the NASA OIG couldn’t find a cheaper option.
Even so, it’s still weird. While the OIG does engage in criminal investigations, those target government employees, not members of the general public. If there’s criminal activity involving outsiders, it’s handled by federal law enforcement agencies, not NASA’s oversight body.
Maybe the questions this purchase raises will be answered in a future OIG report. Or maybe that report will only raise more questions. But it seems pretty clear from even the limited information in this report that Clearview licenses are probably far less expensive than anything offered by its competitors. And, for that reason alone, we’re going to see an uptick in explicable purchases by governments all over the nation for as long as Clearview can manage to remain solvent.
Companies: clearview, clearview ai
from the maybe-just-make-better-t-shirts? dept
While we still lament the fact that the DMCA’s Section 512(f) has no real teeth to punish people for filing bogus DMCA takedown notices, at least some companies are still trying to use it against the most egregious offenders. Last year, Google went after two people in Vietnam, who Google accused of creating at least 65 Google accounts and then using them to send an astounding 117,000 bogus copyright claims.
Apparently, this was the strategy used by the two individuals, Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, to try to remove competitors hawking similar t-shirts to the ones they were selling:
Perhaps not surprisingly, the defendants chose to ignore the lawsuit. The court let Google serve them both via email and SMS, and after reviewing all the details, determined that Google kinda had a point about these jackasses. And now, the judge has entered a default judgment, enjoining the defendants from sending more bogus copyright notices.
Some might argue that this is all kinda pointless. The defendants ignored the case entirely. They had to be served via email, and the judgment is a default. But, still, it’s important to call out those who are abusing the legal system in such a way and establish that such activities will not be tolerated. So even if this particular result doesn’t lead to much, it’s a useful signal reminding people who are drawn to such abuses to maybe think again.
Companies: google
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and logistical hurdles dramatically for farmers.
The lawsuits also noted how the company routinely makes repair difficult and costly through the act of software locks, obnoxious DRM, and “parts pairing” — which involves only allowing the installation of company-certified replacement parts — or mandatory collections of company-blessed components.
Last week John Deere found itself under fire once again, this time by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sent a letter to the company noting that it continues to fail to inform customers in manuals that they don’t have to use expensive John Deere dealership repair options. According to Warren, this could be violating The Clean Air Act:
This is, of course, probably the least of John Deere’s sins. The company constantly exploits its carefully cultivated repair monopoly to jack up costs for parts and repairs for its captive customer base. As a result there’s no shortage of stories about John Deere tractor owners being forced to haul their tractors thousands of miles — or pay thousands of additional dollars — just to keep them functioning.
The problem is that the company has repeatedly promised to do better, then turned right around and continued engaging in anticompetitive and anti-consumer behavior.
Last year, Deere struck a “memorandum of understanding” with the American Farm Bureau Federation promising that the company will make sure farmers have the right to repair their own farm equipment or go to an independent technician. But the promise wound up being largely performative, and primarily aimed at stopping the group from supporting state or federal right to repair laws.
Last March Oregon became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states are considering such bills in 2024.
While the new laws are promising for right to repair activism, in most instances companies in those states are just ignoring the laws with no repercussions so far.
Filed Under: drm, elizabeth warren, hardware, john deere tractors, parts, parts pairing, reform, right to repair, software
Companies: john deere