Comment by Gormo

> I have to point out that your original post is technically correct because you specified "medical expertise" as the focus of your argument and psychologists aren't MDs.

It's also correct because "harm" is a normative concept, which expertise per se doesn't apply to.

> It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement.

Well, no, not really. First, you have to be aware of their subjective experiences, and not just speculating or projecting your own assumptions on to them, then you have to know what criteria to apply to the evaluation of the consequences of those experiences, which can only come from the particular values that they subscribe to, irrespective of your own. And "empirical judgment" is a dubious concept, since, again, judgment is inherently normative.

> If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied,

Anything can be studied, but the extent to which the conclusions of study can be validated for something like this is quite limited. First, you'd be studying something that is a drastic outlier -- only a tiny proportion of the population even attempts suicide for any reason at all.

Second, you're dealing with something with complex causality, much of which can't be directly observed or measured except by the subject themselves, so there's no way to eliminate confounding factors or construct control groups.

Finally, with so many ideological and pecuniary interests attached to a topic like this, it would be difficult to conduct such a study in an institutional setting without it being potentially skewed by bias, and the aforementioned difficulty in setting up controlled experiments would make it difficult for replication to factor out bias.

So I don't think I'd rely on formal studies for this sort of thing, especially when the motivation is to rationalize normative conclusions rather than understand the world as it is.

> and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?

No, I don't think that would be a sufficient reason. Even if it were happening, not everything is the government's responsibility, and not every social problem has a political solution.

> Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.

I don't think it holds in any of them.