The Fox Family Instutitute for Poultry Studies determines that hen house doors should be left open
Comment on ‘Close to zero impact’: US study casts doubt on effect of phone ban in schools
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Keep in mind the paper is a white paper (not peer reviewed) and it is sponsored by the Bezos Family Foundation and Walton Family. Personally taking it with a grain of salt and waiting for some experts to weigh in who are not economists (like most of the authors are) since I don’t feel like combing through this 100 page document.
anachronist@midwest.social 6 days ago
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Interesting that Guardian didn’t see fit to mention it was a white paper unless I missed something.
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Just on the epistemological tip, how is it being a white paper more relevant than having Bezos, Walton, and more sponsors?
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Typically when a news article mentions a “study” it’s a peer reviewed research article. If it’s a white paper or a working paper that is typically pointed out. Leaving that detail out is notable and probably a purposeful decision by my reckoning.
Generally they don’t mention conflicts of interest even if they’re listed so that bit isn’t especially atypical here to me.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 6 days ago
it gets even stupider than that:
an American company that is the philanthropic vehicle of billionaires John D. Arnold and Laura Arnold
who is this John Arnold guy anyway…let’s see…and…oh
since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.
oh, and fun fact, it’s not even a real fucking charity:
so he’s on the board of directors for Meta, which among other things owns Instagram…and he has a side business that pretends to be a charity even though it’s not, and it funds publication of a “study” saying no, teenagers having cell phones 24/7 is totally fine actually.
the tobacco industry used to pay people to wear white lab coats and say cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. it’s often tempting to look back in hindsight and say “how could people have fallen for such obvious bullshit?”
well…
Crotaro@beehaw.org 6 days ago
Wow that casts a healthy dose of doubt on the entire study. Thank you for pointing it all out so thoroughly!
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
I had seen the LLC thing and raised my eyebrows at the projects listed on their wiki, but didn’t see the META board thing, good catch. Everything is both awful and exactly as expected.
its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 6 days ago
This paper is of the same caliber as all of those cigarettes are safe papers from the 70s. Funded propganada with a PR firm plying it to a willing news source.
As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 5 days ago
what I’ve heard previously is that the Guardian’s UK edition sucks, and that the US edition is somewhat better, but at this point I’m comfortable lumping them together.
the article that flipped the “assume everything they publish is bullshit” switch for me was Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says from a few months ago.
it’s written with the tone you’d expect from “serious” journalism:
but if you read carefully…it’s tweets. it’s just fucking tweets. they released a “study” that is a graph of “tweets over time” and claimed that it says something about the prevalence of AI “going rogue”.
and in particular, they take the one story about the Meta executive who allowed an AI “agent” to delete all their emails, notice that there’s a bunch of tweets discussing it, and conflate that with an increased occurrence of it happening.
it’s the equivalent of saying that there were 10,000 moon landings in 1969 because you looked back at newspaper archives and found 10,000 “man lands on moon” headlines. just complete fucking amateur hour data analysis, and for the Guardian to publish it uncritically is shameful.
its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 5 days ago
That is an excellent breakdown. I’m glad I’m not the only one noticing these posts. Poor data analysis being published or claims taken at face value.
I interacted with the Guardian editorial team once in the UK. I had a dataset on academic censoring and we were focusing on sharing the qualitative responses. All seemed on the up and up but we never moved forward for a variety of reasons with the story. Editors and the journalist were great. Tough questions, good insight, etc. Seemed like a good outlet. But that was earlier 2025 and in less than a year, I read that trash we are discussing.