Astral Codex Ten

Instagram

4 min read

Instagram

Article

Instagram is a recurring Instagram account in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 10, 2023 and March 16, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image”; “theory 1 (Instagram special snowflakes)“. It most often appears alongside ACX survey, ACX Survey, ACX Survey Results.

Metadata

  • Category: Instagram Accounts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 10, 2023
  • Last seen: March 16, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
12: Jonathan Haidt revisits whether social media is bad for mental health. Previous studies have said no, by lumping together different ages, genders, types of screen time, and types of mental health result. Haidt finds a subgroup where the answer seems to be clearly yes: teenage girls using social media seem more depressed and anxious. I don’t usually like subgroup slicing but he seems to have done a really good job proving that this subgroup does badly across many different studies. He thinks this is because teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image. I wouldn’t have predicted that this in particular would be so much worse than all the other kinds of social media use, but I guess I’m wrong!
Inline links: revisits whether social media is bad for mental health
30: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month. Musk’s two highest-profile Twitter changes - firing lots of people and selling bluechecks - seem to be going well and even getting adopted by other companies. I can see a case for everyone apologizing and agreeing Musk is doing a good job with Twitter in a year, although prediction markets haven’t shifted much since December.
Inline links: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month, haven’t, shifted
Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
1 ) Spurious result: Although EDS is technically a well-defined disease caused by specific measurable genetic mutations, in practice some cases are just sort of diagnosed on vibes, and the vibes have been getting more popular lately. This doctor calls it an “Instagrammable illness”; this doctor gives an account of EDS patients which stops just short of using the term “special snowflakes”. All Instagrammable conditions cluster together among Instagram users; if transgender is also Instagrammable, that could explain the finding.
Inline links: This doctor calls it an, this doctor
4 ) Autism: There’s an equally mysterious relationship between EDS and autism; autistic people are about 7x more likely to have EDS than controls. This suffers from all the same questions as the transgender link, including the tendency of Instagrammable conditions to correlate together (although in this case it would have to be the parents with Instagram - many of these studies were in very young children). Also, people with autism are about 8x more likely to be gender divergent than the general population. I don’t think anyone knows the exact causal graph here, but it’s at least possible that EDS and transgender are linked because autism is a shared causative factor for both.
Inline links: autistic people are about 7x more likely to have EDS than controls, people with autism are about 8x more likely to be gender divergent than the general population
I think this is some evidence against theory 1 (Instagram special snowflakes). But also, these respondents weren’t people looking for attention. They were people who clicked a box saying “I guess my joints do seem hypermobile” when I specifically asked them about it, on a survey which they were taking for other reasons.