Perceived social isolation (PSI) is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. Social media platforms, commonly used by young adults, may offer an opportunity to ameliorate social isolation. This study assessed associations between social media use (SMU) and PSI among U.S. young adults.

Young adults with high SMU seem to feel more socially isolated than their counterparts with lower SMU. Future research should focus on determining directionality and elucidating reasons for these associations.

http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(17)30016-8/abstract

Nothing like a graph with zero context info or source attribution to inspire confidence...

'Pirate' sites Sci-Hub and LibGen have been ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. A New York District Court granted Elsevier's request for a default judgment of $15 million in damages.

Cancer of this world still kicking. Time for working people of this world to get good large tube and finish it off.

Remarkable that a computer (as they were sitting at one) did not have the same effect! @Vitaliy_Kiselev

"It's not that participants were distracted because they were getting notifications on their phones," said Ward. "The mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity."

@caveport @spacewig I agree, without more information, it is meaningless.

IQ of college graduates seems like basic statistics. Over the decades the fraction of the population who have gone on from high school to earn a college degree has been increasing. As the sample size (those with a college degree) increases relative to the size of the whole population, the mean of the sample is bound to regress toward the mean of the population.

What this doesn't really tell us is how the average intelligence of the population has changed with time. That is, is an average (100 IQ) person from 2010 different than an average (100 IQ) person from 1960? I would like to believe that increased access to education has lead to a decrease in illiteracy and innumeracy over the last 50 or 60 years and the practice of those basic skills has lead to change in what is normal/average for the population. So not only are the people going into college today more average (because there are more of them) but also the mean of the population today looks more like the relatively smarter/more-affluent group who would have been graduating in 1960. At least that's my hypothesis.

Given that the trend goes back to 1960, it doesn't support the hypothesis that smart-phones/connectivity/reliance on technology is making us dumber.

IQ tests have not proven to be very reliable. They are about as reliable as lie detector tests. That alone makes the results VERY dubious.

Well, Vitaliy, YOU posted the IQ chart with no other comment or reference. I figured you may have had a reason, but maybe not. If you are going to correct posters here for having faulty logic and or information, you need to apply the same high standards to your own posts.

More leisure and computer games

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23552.pdf

Charts from article mentioned in other topic

https://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/17461/smartphone-destroyed-a-generation

Issues with sleep

http://news.gallup.com/poll/166553/less-recommended-amount-sleep.aspx

Smartphone usage

"I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'"

"And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."

"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-2508036343.html