In the 1950s we started our journey in beginning to understand our physiology — junk food, asbestos, lead, and of course smoking. For the latter, how carcinogenesis develops in the lungs was for the common man more than a fuzzy concept — it was invisible, contested, and deliberately obscured by an industry with everything to lose. It is, as Tim Wu writes, "an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to." And yet neurology — the science of a brain trying to understand a brain — is still in its infancy. So much so, it is important to appreciate that the DSM-5 only recognized behavioral addiction as a clinical category in 2013. Not only do we not have answers in the form of measurements, we hardly know what questions to ask. What are the effects of algorithmic information exposure on our psychology? Today, just as fuzzy as those smoke-filled lungs, indeed.

Ask yourself the following ridiculous questions we can't even begin to answer: at what count of followers, on which platform, will the identity of a self-absorbed influencer completely consolidate? We don't know. What information flow, divided by which particular news outlet, in what daily doses, will cause someone to believe that 5G caused a respiratory pandemic orchestrated by "the elites"? We don't know. And what dynamic of likes, comments, and messages classifies as an altruistic-reciprocity networking strategy for building "a brand and followership," versus two human beings trying to have an authentic friendship? We don't know.

Some researchers have dismissed the correlation between social media use and declining mental health as negligibly — as low as one percent of variance. As Haidt puts it, these people confuse the map for the territory. The dataset is not reality.

Haidt and Rausch make painfully clear the worsening well-being of children is a global phenomenon and no other variable can hardly explain it. Spending almost five hours a day, grabbing it every six minutes of waking life, tapping it almost three thousand times, constantly ringing Pavlovian bells with every notification, being continuously engaged in the unbounded preening of oneself, engaged in a predominantly passive consumption state of downward-social-comparison? This as the new, twenty-first-century predominantly discretionary activity of life is obviously stupid and yet another dumb experiment we should not run.

This "correlation is not causation" tactic is the same corporate playbook we have heard before. It was obvious when nonsmoking housewives of chain-smoking husbands developed cancer at a significantly higher rate. So too is it obvious now that nothing else is most probably the cause.

Unlike those who cite the one percent correlation confusion, as Haidt stresses, the burden of proof here is not that of a criminal trial — "beyond a reasonable doubt" — but that of a civil trial: the preponderance of the evidence. We do not need definitive causality to be prudent and wise here. We need probable cause. And the preponderance is overwhelming.

The reliable disastrous causality between time-on-device maximizing algorithms, neuronal rewiring, and its effects on our identity, our relationships to others, and ultimately our well-being, will be extremely obvious — and frankly dumb — in retrospect. I am with Haidt on Pascal's Wager here: if the alarm ringers are wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. If instead the denialists are wrong, we will have stood by doing nothing while we ruined the lives of an entire generation. On the off chance a few trillion-dollar multinationals are going to miss out on some profit in Q3? Am I really going to take that chance, stand by, and do nothing? No. I will certainly not.

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