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AR 23:13 - Why the surge in suicides? (and, "fake news")
In this issue:
SUICIDE - what is behind the greatly increasing suicide rates in America?
TRUTH - the seductive influence of novel vs. redundant information
Apologia Report 23:13 (1,379)
April 12, 2018
SUICIDE
The March 28 ABC News headline tells us that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the "Teen suicide rate [is] up 70% from 2006 to 2016" with the blame heaped on bullying, mental illness, and addictions. <www.goo.gl/S5dQah>
The Blaze <www.goo.gl/B9tBTg> elaborates: "the number of self-inflicted deaths of white children between the ages of 10 and 17 increased 70 percent during the time span. Black children and teens are less likely to kill themselves, but their suicide rate rose even higher judging from the study: an increase of 77 percent. ...
"With a society that is now plugged in to propaganda and messaging at all times, the exposure is even more difficult for teenagers to process. ...
"Tom Simon, author of a CDC report on the topic <www.goo.gl/TVEjmq> said, 'We know that overall in the US, we're seeing increases in suicide rates across all age groups,' calling the pattern 'pretty robust.' ...
"Out of all ethnic groups, American Indians saw the highest rise in suicide rates with an increase of 89 percent for women in their population. Middle-aged white women had an escalation of 80 percent. ...
"In the study by the National Center for Health Statistics, it was found that although the rate was low for girls ten to fourteen, the rate of suicide had tripled in the age group during the time of the study."
Ben Shapiro <www.goo.gl/bhWj6y> finds misplaced blame: "There are those who blame the rise in drugs as well, particularly opioids - but according to a study from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, drinking, smoking and drug use may be at the lowest levels 'seen in decades.'" In contrast, he writes: "There seems to be a crisis of meaning taking place in America. And that crisis of meaning is heavily linked to a decline in religious observance." ...
"Americans, particularly young Americans, increasingly don't feel that their lives have purpose. ... This is a problem of the soul. ...
"So, what's to be done? First, we need to get off the weak sauce of 'spirituality without religion.' ... Religion is about practice - it is about acting in moral and ethical ways because your Creator demands it. ... And it means that human beings need collective meaning as well: brotherhood in this journey. If we can't supply those things to our children, it's no wonder they're in increasing levels of despair....'"
We think the November 16, 2017 video recording of an impressively insightful discussion between Jonathan Haidt <www.goo.gl/bdhiFN> and Jordan B. Peterson <www.goo.gl/VVPsYv> about the perilous state of the academy in the West sheds light on the above. It includes a focus (1:13:00) on what is behind "the terrific increase in depression and anxiety among adolescents." Haidt calls it "the biggest social science problem of our age." At 1:16:48 social-media influence is presented as perhaps the biggest threat. <www.goo.gl/RkL7Je>
We highly recommend that you follow this with the March 16, 2018 presentation "Jonathan Haidt Tests Viewpoint Diversity of University Student Audiences" <www.goo.gl/QcsovD> to gain deeper insights on the greatest crisis facing secular higher education in our day.
For a good review of Peterson's worldview thinking, see <www.goo.gl/s7RMt3>
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TRUTH
"The spread of true and false news online" by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral -- the abstract: "We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it." Science, 359:6380 - 2018, pp1146-1151 <www.goo.gl/rVHbpp>
Los Angeles Times science and medicine editor Karen Kaplan writes (Mar 8 '18): "On Twitter, fake news spreads faster and further than real news — and bots aren't to blame. ... Compared to tweets about claims that were verifiably true, tweets about claims that were undeniably false were 70% more likely to be retweeted in the Twitterverse. ...
"A team of data scientists and social media experts from MIT came to these dispiriting conclusions after examining the spread of thousands of tweets shared by millions of people over a span of 12 years. They reported their findings this week in the journal Science.
"The answers lie in the emerging field of the 'second brain,' or the millions of neurons that live in the GI tract.
"'It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people,' the [author] trio added."
As for method: "They mapped out every single rumor cascade rooted by a claim that had been fact-checked by snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com or urbanlegends.about.com. They wound up with roughly 126,000 rumor cascades for their analysis."
Some of the more interesting findings include:
• "The researchers looked at the top 0.01% of both true and false rumor cascades and found that the false ones 'diffused eight hops deeper into the Twittersphere than the truth.' ...
• "The time it took for a rumor cascade to achieve a depth of 10 was about 20 times longer for true news than it was for false news. Also, the time it took for a true rumor cascade to reach a depth of 10 was nearly 10 times longer than the time it took for a false rumor cascade to reach a depth of 19.
• "Rumor cascades about politics outnumbered those of all other topics. Coming in second were cascades about urban legends, followed by ones about business, terrorism, science, entertainment and natural disasters. The news that ultimately spread to the most people concerned politics, urban legends and science. ...
• "Compared with people who spread true news, those who spread false news were newer to Twitter, had fewer followers, followed fewer people and were less active with the social media platform.
"What makes false news so much more enticing than true news? The researchers believe the answer is that false news has more novelty, which makes it both more surprising and more valuable - and thus, more likely to be retweeted." <www.goo.gl/J2KtmT>
Angela Chen (The Verge, Mar 8 '18) relays two more significant findings from the study. First (and unsurprisingly), "'Novel information is thought to be more valuable than redundant information,' says study co-author Sinan Aral.... 'People who spread novel information gain social status because they're thought to be 'in the know' or to have inside information.'"
Second, "[T]he scientists used a bot detection algorithm, and found that bots helped spread false news as well as true news at the same rate. 'So bots could not explain this massive difference in the diffusion of true and false news we're finding in our data,' says Aral, 'it's humans that are responsible.'" <www.goo.gl/k9Lv3f>
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