
Screens might be as bad for mental health as potatoes - dhh2106
https://www.wired.com/story/screens-might-be-as-bad-for-mental-health-as-potatoes/
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linuxlizard
As a programmer in Idaho, I breathed a sigh of relief.

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ghostbrainalpha
As a hacker news reader, I laughed out loud.

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skywhopper
...overly clever headline meaning "variation in 'screen time' is basically
uncorrelated to mental health". Both because "screen time" is poorly defined,
and because whatever impact it has is vastly overshadowed by numerous other
factors. But studies about "screen time" get attention because the culture has
shifted so drastically in the past 10 years.

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_Schizotypy
They are saying it is correlated, just as much as the correlation between
mental health and potatoes which is next to negligible yet existent

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tapland
Is it a negative correlation? Because oh I love potatoes.

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rjsw
It probably won't help your mental health if someone throws a potato at your
head.

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debacle
I'd like to see a study that makes a distinction between "screen time" and
"desk/couch time." Not all screen time is created equal.

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Dirlewanger
Right. From a naive perspective, I think it's safe to say that 2 hours of
screen time watching a movie with loved ones is better for your health than a
cumulative 2 hours of looking at your phone browsing social media and
constantly comparing your life to others.

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BerislavLopac
I think that the effect of potatoes on mental health is sadly underrated.

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jjclarkson
The Potato Hack agrees with you
[https://potatohack.com/](https://potatohack.com/)

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atesti
This page produces tons of spurious correlations:
[http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations](http://tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations)

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evmar
I couldn't quite follow what the article was saying about "anaytical paths",
but I think they're talking about spurious correlations.

I worked on a stats app. We referred to the problem of finding correlations
from data as "the green jelly beans problem" after
[https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/) . There are techniques to deal
with it like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction)
.

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shahbaby
click bait headline

