Loneliness and mental health

The Rational Restoration solves the increasingly prevalent problem of loneliness and mental health. People function better in a community than in isolation or Internet networks.

Here, Jonathan Haidt explains the problems with Instagram and TikTok.

Jonathan Haidt

@JonHaidt

Usually I show slides, but this was my effort to convey what's happening to teen mental health in a conversation, with

@FraserNelson

, at

@arc_forum

. Includes 4 norms that would break us out of collective action problems around kids, phones, and free-play.

https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1725181519726047634

He proposes 4 norms:

1. No smart phones before high school. They can have flip phones instead.

2. No social media before 16. The more parents who do this, the easier it is for other parents to do it.

3. Phone-free schools. 

4. Far more free play and unsupervised play.

_____

According to studies, 25% of people feel lonely, but even more so in younger age groups.

https://www.statista.com/chart/31243/respondents-who-feel-fairly-or-very-lonely/

What is the rational restoration?

As used in this blog, the term "Restoration" refers to the events and teachings associated with the Book of Mormon and related revelations and organizations. 

The Restoration involves a combination of natural and supernatural events. Angels, resurrected beings, visions, and Priesthood power combined with physical and mental exertion to organize people, construct temples, translate ancient plates, publish materials, etc.

Historical and contemporary evidence can be understood in any combinations of natural and supernatural phenomenon. In this blog, we recognize that for most people, resorting to supernatural explanations to resolve cognitive dissonance is the "easy way out" that is usually unconvincing and ephemeral. 

Where possible, we focus on rational explanations for the Restoration. For example, while many believers have come to think Joseph Smith merely read words that appeared on a stone (or spectacles) in a hat, we think Joseph actually translated the engravings on the ancient plates.

Certainly such a translation would also involve supernatural elements. It's a question of how much was natural and how much was supernatural.

The stone-in-the-hat (SITH) narrative is almost entirely supernatural. It requires a mysterious incognito supernatural translator (MIST) to provide the words that somehow materialized on an ordinary stone. The only "natural" elements are Joseph's ability to read aloud the words and the scribe's ability to hear and record what Joseph dictated. Under SITH, when Joseph edited the text in 1837 and 1840, he violated the divine wordsmithing that was done for him by MIST

The translation narrative involves the Urim and Thummim that "magnified" the engravings on the plates, whether literally or figuratively or both, to enable Joseph to interpret the characters or hieroglyphs. Once he learned the characters, Joseph used his own lexicon to express the meaning in English, a completely natural and ordinary process. 

This also explains how it was that Joseph, as a translator drawing from his own understanding, was able to make revisions and corrections to the completed text of the Book of Mormon. 

We'll discuss this and more in depth on this blog.