Kevin Burch | Sky High Confidence
5K posts
@kevinburch
All kids have a zest for life. Don’t duck it up and they’ll fly…
A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development. But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong. Are social scientists too lazy to check if their results are even true? Link below.
Okay let's see who can reply to this
“At the heart of adult resistance to screens seems to be the idea that adults have a right, even a duty, to control what children pay attention to. Attention is the simplest manifestation of what a person cares about, and intruding on their attention always signals that their values are less important than the intruder’s values. Adults communicate this awareness to other adults with phrases like ‘Pardon the interruption,’ but with kids, it’s often assumed that the interruption is rather a necessary redirection or correction.” - Aaron Stupple and Logan Chipkin, 2025, The Sovereign Child, Chapter 3: Watching what they want (screens), p. 41
there's fuck you money, but then there is fuck you skills. you can be so skilled that you don't actually have to care about what people think. you'll be fine no matter what
This is your periodic reminder that the problem of how to introduce children at the early-reader-and-writer stage to the knowledge density of internet without deluging them with technicalities, idiosyncrasies, age-inappropriate content, and slop has been solved: give them a LLM.
Powerful new longitudinal study finds that adolescents who increase their social media over a 2 year period show lower cognitive performance, compared to those who did not increase. Fom @jasonmnagata's team, using ABCD data, and controlling for all the right stuff.
A recent study claimed to show that social media use was hurting kids' cognitive development. But I had access to their data, so I was able to show that they were completely wrong. Are social scientists too lazy to check if their results are even true? Link below.
🗣️ New @UCSFChildrens study in @LancetRH_Americ! 📱🧠 Increasing social media use among early adolescents associated with lower cognitive performance 2 years later 🔗 Read here: tinyurl.com/socmedmem
Checked: Nothing here survives within families. "controlling for all the right stuff" evidently did not include using reasonable fixed-effects like family-level ones. Social scientists have one job and they consistently fail to do it properly.
🗣️ New @UCSFChildrens study in @LancetRH_Americ! 📱🧠 Increasing social media use among early adolescents associated with lower cognitive performance 2 years later 🔗 Read here: tinyurl.com/socmedmem
The jury in Los Angeles will soon return its verdict on whether social media is addictive. Meta's own researchers said it is. See this quote, and many others, in my new review paper laying out 7 lines of evidence: worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/social…
Does this silly little man not understand that Islam is a very aggressive belief system, threatening death to anyone who does not convert to Islam The Buddhists, the Taoists, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Hindus and the Sikhs and the Confucians and the Catholics don't go around shouting about beheading people they disagree with Is this too much for your tiny little brain to take in ? Oh. The doorbell rang. The police I assume...
