Weekly Web Harvest for 2025-01-19

  • Are Cell Phones Really Destroying Kids’ Mental Health? | The New Republic
    If we want to make Americans less reliant on smartphones, we have to address the problems of misery among all Americans. Parental stress reflects on children and young adults, who often witness all the ugly consequences of a cruel society and economy. Direct stresses on youth, enhanced by diminishing promises of a flourishing future, a sense of planetary demise, tightening social restrictions, educational failure, and the rise of public cruelty in real life and social media, demand a much more comprehensive—and political—approach than Haidt can offer with his laser-focus on phones. The danger of emphasizing a single cause for such a widespread and deadly problem is that there is a good chance we would fail to address the range of the real contributing factors.

  • Datasette: An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
    Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

  • [2405.06087] When combinations of humans and AI are useful: A systematic review and meta-analysis
    “First, we found that, on average, human-AI combinations performed significantly worse than the best of humans or AI alone. Second, we found performance losses in tasks that involved making decisions and significantly greater gains in tasks that involved creating content. Finally, when humans outperformed AI alone, we found performance gains in the combination, but when the AI outperformed humans alone we found losses.”
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