Articles 11.
11.1
A Nirav or Naval? - Auren Hoffman
“If you are gonna be a founder, you gotta choose if you are going to be an insider or an outsider. Every insider secretly wants the freedom to be an outsider. Every outsider secretly wants the respectability of being an insider. Some outsiders eventually become insiders. Rarely does an insider ever become an outsider.
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A great founder can be an insider (like a Nirav) or an outsider (like a Naval).
A good board member is generally an insider but there are definitely exceptions where outsiders make good board members. Even companies where the founders are outsiders can benefit from insider board members (PayPal had Mike Moritz on their board).
Insiders always know what to say. They are generally much more polite than outsiders. They cultivate the press. In politics, the insiders are always leaking to the press (think of James A. Baker) because they know the inside game.
To really climb the corporate ladder, you most definitely need to be an insider. Insiders anoint other insiders. Non-founder CEOs are almost always insiders (the only time when they are outsiders is when the company is completely broken). Outsiders take things from insiders. Insiders inherit things from from other insiders.
The establishment are insiders. The “experts” are insiders.
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It is a lot easier to go through life as an insider than an outsider. If you want your children to be successful, you almost always do things to set them up to be insiders. You get them to play an insider sport (like squash, sailing, fencing, horse-riding, tennis, or golf). You get them rise through the present-day educational system. If they go to Harvard, they get their chance to be an insider.
Helicopter parenting is about getting your kid to become a Nirav. It is a much more predictive path to success. It is more assured. It is more likely that your child will be happy.
Being a Naval is MUCH higher beta. They could end up changing the world for the better. They also could blow it up. Or just never be accepted and live less happy.
So most parents play it safe. They encourage their kids to be insiders. Even children of successful outsiders are almost always insiders.
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Insider Ideology.
In the U.S., most insiders have a common political ideology. Most claim they are center-left. But to be a good insider, you can’t really be ideological. So you pick center-left because it is the safest place to be on the spectrum.
Outsiders can be any political ideology except for center-left. So if you meet someone that is not center-left, they are rarely an insider. Outsiders that really want to be an insider will at least pretend to be center-left. In fact, when you see someone move their ideology to center-left, it usually means they are preparing themselves to become an insider.
11.2 *
The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International - Zach Rauch & Jonathan Haidt
“It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as Jean Twenge and I have shown.
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When Jon first asked me to figure out whether teen mental health had collapsed around the globe after 2012, I thought he was nuts. The task felt impossible and beyond what I thought I could accomplish. But it was precisely this kind of work that I aspired to do. I set aside my doubt, put my head down, and gathered every relevant study I could find on teen mental health trends across the globe. In a series of posts, I will share with you what I have found so far. I address the Anglosphere today. In future posts, I’ll show what I have learned about Scandinavia and other developed nations and what I have learned from five international surveys, each with data from dozens of nations. There is much more to be done, especially beyond Western countries.
The short answer to Jon’s question is: Teen mental health plummeted across the Western world in the early 2010s, particularly for girls and particularly in the most individualistic nations. The longer answer begins below and will continue in parts 2 and 3.
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In one of the most harrowing and unprecedented trends of the 21st century, young teenage girls were hospitalized for self-harm in 2020 at just about three times the rate they were in 2010. We see similar but slightly less steep trends among the 15-19-year-old girls (we also see this same gendered pattern in self-poisoning).
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Figure 9 shows one of the most sudden spikes in self-harm I’ve seen in any of the datasets I’ve looked at. In 2011, 13-16-year-old girls had a rate of 688.5 hospitalizations per 100,000. Within two years, that number had jumped to 1235 hospitalizations per 100,000 (a 79.4% increase). This graph confirms something we see in the American data repeatedly: something big seems to have happened to girls around 2012.
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Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries? What could have affected girls around the English-speaking world so strongly and in such a synchronized way?
As discussed in previous posts and as Twenge et al. (2022) showed, it can’t be the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The timing of that event is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, namely: the epidemic should have started in 2009 and then gotten progressively better after 2012 as the economy improved in the USA and other countries. In an earlier post, Jean Twenge showed that it can’t be caused by rising academic pressure either. And it certainly can’t be caused by the most popular theory we hear in the USA: school shootings and other stress-inducing events. Why would school shootings or active shooter drills implemented only in the USA lead to an immediate epidemic across the entire English-speaking world?
At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.
11.3*
The Great Reboot: In Memoriam Mark Fisher - Ewan Morrrison
“While twentieth-century culture was seized by recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel like newness was infinitely available, the twenty-first century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion … It doesn’t feel like the twenty-first century has started yet.
I’d like to show how Fisher’s predictions about our culture have come true and to engage with the question he left unanswered at his death: what is to be done?
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In the six years since Fisher’s death, the arts have been dominated by remakes, reboots, sequels, spin-offs and imitations, leaving an ever-shrinking space for genuine creativity and new ideas. As Fisher said, we are immersed in “a sense of repetition, of clotted or blocked time … buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of newness.” Our culture industries endlessly repackage the hits of the twentieth century; they have all but eliminated creative innovation in music, film and TV, leaving us no option but to consume the derivative, generic productions of mass culture, while corporations spread bland uniformity across the globe. “To be in the twenty-first century,” as Fisher points out, “is to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens.”
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We cannot imagine a better world than this one, so the future has degenerated into endless cycles of aimless repetition. This makes us ideal targets for techno-consumerism, in which all products have built-in planned obsolescence, leaving us no choice but to buy the same things over and over again. For Fisher, these are the consequences of the globalist neoliberal dream of the end of history. Neoliberal thinker Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 book of that name, makes a similar prediction: “The end of history will be a very sad time … In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
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The free market can no longer be justified by the infinite consumer choice it offers. The days of endless variety are over. In many cultural arenas, you now have little to no choice as to what to consume. And things have become increasingly difficult for aspiring new artists, who cannot even get started on their careers because the creative arena is already completely dominated by corporate behemoths and by the recycled dead forms of the twentieth century.
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We have ceased to believe in any alternative to corporate domination, as Fisher predicted in his theory of capitalist realism. The techno-capitalist future will be a kind of Groundhog Day. In 2070, we will probably still be digesting Taylor Swift, Marvel, Star Wars and Diet Coke and no new cultural forms will have emerged in half a century, since the corporate behemoths will have crushed all competition. Cultural amnesia means that we won’t even realize that we’re consuming the same reprocessed products again and again and again. We’re like people trapped in the matrix, living in a simulated reality version of the late twentieth century, endlessly partying like it’s 1999.
As Fisher warned, “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”
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And what are the psychological consequences of living within this state of “frenzied stasis,” in which our technologies are force-feeding us the same reheated content with accelerating frequency? As Fisher diagnoses, this creates ennui and aimlessness: “the boring is everywhere. Boredom consumes our being; we feel we will never escape it.” This leads to depression on a society-wide scale.
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It is not clear that he took his life as a direct result of his theories, but we should bear in mind that Fisher often drew connections between his own struggles with severe depression and the growing malaise of society as a whole. “The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood or healed,” he writes, “if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.”
11.4***
Meditations On Moloch - Scott Alexander
“ The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
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And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is. “
11.5
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health - Jon Haidt & Zach Rauch
“When parents are asked to identify their top fears about the safety of their children, what do you think tops the list? According to a survey last year by Safehome.org, it’s not cars, strangers, or any other physical threat; it’s “internet/social media.” That’s not just for parents of teenagers and pre-teens, whose lives seem to revolve around their phones. It’s even true for parents of younger kids, ages 7-9 because every parent sees it coming and few know what to do about it. Parents don’t want their children to disappear into phones, as so many of their friends' children have; some resolve to wait until 8th grade, or later. Then their child hits them with the main argument that makes parents buckle: “But everyone else has a phone, so I’m being left out.”
For parents who resisted, or who plan to resist, a new report may encourage many more parents to join you: Sapien Labs, which runs an ongoing global survey of mental health with nearly a million participants so far, released a “Rapid Report” today on a question they added in January asking young adults (those between ages 18 and 24): “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?” When they plot the age of first smartphone on the X axis against their extensive set of questions about mental health on the Y axis, they find a consistent pattern: the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today. This is true in all the regions studied (the survey is offered in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili), and the relationships are consistently stronger for women.
We believe these findings have important implications for parents, heads of K-12 schools, and legislators currently considering bills to raise minimum ages or require age verification for some kinds of sites (especially social media and pornography). We’ll address those implications at the end of this post. But first: what did Sapien Labs do, and what did they find?”
11.6
The Case For Phone-Free Schools - Jon Haidt & Zach Rauch
A lot has changed since 2019. The case for phone-free schools is much stronger now. As Zach Rausch and I have documented here at the After Babel Substack, evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012, has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their own children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children. Two weeks ago, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory warning that social media can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
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“Think about how hard it is for you to stay on task and sustain a train of thought while working on your computer. Email, texts, and alerts of all kinds continually present you with opportunities to do something easier and more fun than what you’re doing now. If you are over age 25, you have a fully mature frontal cortex to help you resist temptation and maintain focus, and yet you probably still have difficulties doing so. Now imagine a phone in a child’s pocket, buzzing every few minutes with an invitation to do something other than pay attention. There’s no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task.”
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“Whatever rules a school may have in place against it, many studies have established that students check their phone a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and easily derailed by interruptions from their devices. One study from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said that they sometimes use their phones during class for non-educational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phones, mostly texting. Many studies show that students who use their phones during class learn less and get lower grades. “
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“For example, consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.”