Per the very paper we are discussing, LLMs when asked to act as therapists reinforce stigmas about mental health, and "respond inappropriately" (e.g. encourage delusional thinking). This is not just lower quality than professional therapy, it is actively harmful, and worse than doing nothing.
The main concerns expressed in Robyn's note, as I read them, seem to be 1) generative AI has polluted the web with text that was not written by humans, and so it is no longer feasible to produce reliable word frequency data that reflects how humans use natural language; and 2) simultaneously, sources of natural language text that were previously accessible to researchers are now less accessible because the owners of that content don't want it used by others to create AI models without their permission. A third concern seems to be that support for and practice of any other NLP approaches is vanishing.
Making resources like wordfreq more visible won't exacerbate any of these concerns.
ActBlue and WinRed are now used by Democrats and Republicans respectively for fundraising at just about every level, even pretty local races, and they're clearly selling access to their lists.
I donated a small amount to a Democratic candidate for a legislature race in my state (via ActBlue) and spent the next year unsubscribing from mailing lists that sending me hyperbolic nonsense about national races.
I donated a small amount to a Republican presidential primary candidate (via WinRed) and got signed up for campaign spam from Republicans running tight races all over the country, as well as like fifteen subscriptions to different mailing lists run by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times.
Word salad is "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases." Which part of the article seemed confusing/unintelligible/random to you?
> Our data came from a larger project investigating college students’ lifestyle and well-being. In this project, one hundred and seventy-one college students (102 females; Mage = 19.24, SDage = 2.68) participated for partial course credit between September 2021 and May 2022. For our purpose, we focus on the longitudinal component of this study, which consisted of two parts: a baseline lab session (Phase 1, N = 171) and two follow-up weekly surveys (Phase 2, N = 160; Phase 3, N = 160).
I slightly misinterpreted the following from the article:
> We decided to assess social media use across four platforms for three reasons. First, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were the most popular social media platforms among college students at the time of our study design (Perrin and Anderson, 2019).
This is telling us that they designed the study at a time when a 2019 report on social media usage was the most up-to-date available. I misread initially, thinking that (Perrin and Anderson, 2019) was the study design they followed, but it is actually this:
Perrin, A., & Anderson, M. (2019). Share of US adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-....
I get that they probably didn't feel like revising their design in the fall of 2021, but this would have been the right thing to do, given trends in social media use in young people at the time. It is odd that this 2023 paper doesn't even mention TikTok. Its exclusion, justified or not, is a limitation worth noting.
> Providing stronger evidence of the directionality of this effect, Study 3 (N = 171) showed that in college students CRP predicted increased social media use in the subsequent week even after controlling for current week’s use.
The basic methodology for this part is:
* Blood sample (measured for CRP)
* 1 week later: survey on social media use (participants using Screen Time app to objectively measure their activity)
* 1 week after that: survey on social media use again
Then they ran some regression analyses.
I didn't see anything here that rules out the alternative possible explanation: college students who use social media more are more stressed out as a result of their social media use.
Most people won't be able to access the paper via that link.
I was able to get to it by going to Google Scholar and searching "Brain, Behavior and Immunity" david lee. The first result was a sciencedirect link that did allow me to read the whole thing.
They had students use screen tracking software to log what apps they were using. The researchers ignored TikTok because it wasn't included in some pre-existing methodology they were following.
Ignoring TikTok for any reason in 2021-2022 is a huge mistake. Once I saw that, I decided I'm not interested in their findings.
> I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community.
University media offices seem to think it's their job to misinterpret and exaggerate scientific findings in whatever way will draw the most clicks to their press release.
I've only had a chance to skim, but there's all kinds of weirdness here. In "Study 3" they measure 171 college students' social media use on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, ignoring TikTok, which those subjects probably use more than all the others combined.
I'm in a much smaller city than NYC and /r/<mycity> is a very reliable place to find out what is going on around town, chat about the best place to go for <cuisine>, etc.
I'm boycotting reddit this week, and I will never use their app, but I just don't know where else to go for communities related to niche non-tech interests, and state & local stuff. I guess Facebook groups, but FB is practically unusable these days.
> This is not the way an emotionally intelligent person approaches a conversation.
Good thing you and the other apparently high EQ commenters in this thread are here to set the records straight and bully some guy over his personality traits as determined by you after reading a single blog post.