The Science of Motivating Young People and More Great Content

A compilation of great quotes and links from the past couple weeks.

Aug 27, 2024

Hello Bar-setters!

School is starting back up! I hope all of you are doing well in this busy time. For today, I want to share a few great resources and interesting findings…

The Science of Motivating 10-25 Year-Olds

Motivating 10-25-year-olds is a challenge! Dr. David Yeager, who apprenticed under the amazing Carol Dweck, recently released a book about how to understand and communicate better with young-adults in this vital age range. I found this information to be beyond essential. How are we just now getting this book?

If interested, I really enjoyed these two podcasts with Dr. Yeager:

Progress on Smartphone Norms

Last month, I shared a couple of positive stories about how different places are waking up to how insane it is to allow smartphones in school. Now, there are more positive developments being reported in Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel newsletter:

In June, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media companies to take measures to better protect young people online. These measures include adding warning labels to social media platforms, limiting addictive features like push notifications and autoplay, and sharing internal data on how their products affect young people.
The good news is we won’t have to wait long to see whether Murthy’s recommended actions will make a difference. A bill just signed into law in Minnesota independently implements many of the reforms Murthy called for.
The legislation, introduced by state representative Zack Stephenson and which I helped design, will force social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat to reveal the results of their user experiments, disclose how their algorithms prioritize what users see on their feeds, explain how they treat abusive actors, and reveal how much time people spend on these platforms, including how often they receive notifications.
Sharing internal data is particularly valuable — something I know firsthand from my time working at Facebook (now called Meta).
In the four years I worked there, I helped produce dozens of internal reports on the company’s news feed algorithms. Despite finding evidence that optimizing for engagement often increases exposure to harassment, misinformation, and graphic content, Facebook continued to prioritize engagement over content quality as part of an effort to beat rivals like TikTok.

Mindfulness Can Be as Effective as Anxiety Medication

A study in JAMA Psychiatry, which tracked 208 participants for eight weeks, found that mindfulness-based interventions, like breathing and attention exercises, are as effective a leading anxiety medication. I can attest that consistent meditation was the most effective and profound intervention I found for overcoming an anxiety disorder when I was in college. As Dr. Jonathan Haidt writes in The Happiness Hypothesis:

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Hard Truths About Why Young Men Are Frustrated About Dating

Like me, the amazing Dr. Rob Henderson is quite concerned about the way novel technologies often discourage personal development, particularly in young people. In a recent interview, he shares some concerns about young men and dating:

One thought that has occurred to me about why men and maybe to some extent women… are so frustrated about dating is because everything else in life is so easy. Every other basic need is easily satisfied. You have clean water at the flick of a switch. Food—you tap a couple of buttons on your phone, and someone delivers you Uber Eats. You’re warm, you’re sheltered, every other need is instantly and immediately met. But it’s just this one area of romance… that’s still very difficult to fulfill. You still have to work for it. You’ll see… in the comments section, there are a few guys who are like, "I can’t wait for the robot GFs to arrive. Just hang on tight, boys, the robot GFs are coming." And to me, that’s the mindset of, “I just want Door Dash to deliver me a girlfriend.

Some related reading: