Veli‐Matti Karhulahti

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 1d

it’s understandable that stakeholders want reviews but sadly it’s garbage in garbage out; there’s no easy way to disseminate this complexity

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks, a nice overview of their work. The problem is (=continues to be) that dicussions, like those on the site, are based on reviews while very few publications are able to tackle the issue

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 1d

there's also "interviews with experts in multiple fields, including behavioural addiction"-- why isn't this data shared? Relative to a) the seriousness of this topic, b) the fact that expert views on design aren't sensitive & c) resources isn't an issue, sharing this data should be no-brainer

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 1d

the features listed in the press release are used by almost every successful platforms/products-- I'd like to understand how TikTok design is different (beyond its size), and what specific combos/types produce addiction here (ppl have studied this for ages with little success)

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 1d

European Commission's formal analysis of TikTok has concluded today & finds it to represent 'addictive design'

--great that someone is doing this work but would really appreciate some transparency in the process so that experts (like myself) could understand

ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

ec.europa.eu

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 3d

Piranesi! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranes...

Piranesi (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 3d

Some examples could be to class those who play from those who don't, or by those who failed the control item, or by employment situation/eduction (if these things count)

In the survey, the respondents were first asked about their perceived health and quality of life, before moving on to digital gaming. They were asked about the amount of time and money spent on gaming-related things per week. Respondents were also asked how much they liked or disliked various aspects of games. Non-gamers were asked why they do not play digital games and how much they have played various non-digital games.

Background variables included the respondent's mother tongue, gender, year of birth, age, level of education, party affiliation and NUTS3 region of residence.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 3d

How large? We have a nationally (FI) representative n≈8000 dataset open for use here

services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/FS...

The survey includes the following additional measurement indicators: Gaming addiction scale (GAS7), Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT10), Gaming disorder test (GDT), Problem gaming test (THL1), PROMIS General Mental Health (GMH-2), PROMIS General Physical Health (GPH-2), Work ability index (WAI), Work recovery question (WR), Perceived loneliness (PL), Pathological gambling (BBDS), General anxiety disorder scale 2 (GAD-2) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 9d

Not exactly what you look for but among the most interesting takes on postdiction that comes to mind:

doi.org/10.1080/0898...

Preregistering qualitative research

The threat to reproducibility and awareness of current rates of research misbehavior sparked initiatives to better academic science. One initiative is preregistration of quantitative research. We i...

doi.org

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 9d

Orange is light disagree & red is strong disagree, there's only ~7% ppl who disagree in total which imo falls well within some natural noise

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 9d

Thanks Marcus, hope to meet again somewhere soon!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 9d

indirectly though: he co-created many of measures in the field so his work pace (haste) has likely contributed to the issue that way

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 9d

Yeah the sample included several of his papers too. For his credit, he was rather helpful with the materials requests (& I've heard he has been in the past too)-- I don't think this affected results much bc the prevalence rate was ~zero anyway

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

I don't find it so strange tbh. Eg weekly lotto is betting real money, but associating it with gambling stereotypes (slot machines etc) isn't necessarily clear for everyone

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

In English, betting real money is, indeed, 99% gambling (in Slovak, terms operate a bit differently, as it does in Finnish and Swedish, which is interesting for sure!)

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Yeah there's plenty of variation in psych too, nuance over generalisations!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

There are two things: a) yes, fundamental psych RQs aren't statistical in nature, plus, b) psych constructs tend to be language bound & language games evolve, so psych can never be science in physics terms

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks :) The vagueness of related concepts is indeed a long-standing issue in other contexts too-- the chapter sounds interesting, looking forward to check the PDF!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Yeah the intentional confusion by the industry certainly doesn't help..

In a critical cultural
analysis of the gambling industry, Kingma describes how
operators and regulators denominate their industry by 'games of chance', 'entertainment', 'customers', 'guests'
and 'consumers', rather than 'gambling' and 'gamblers', as these last words carry connotations of excessive and
irresponsible gambling for money. Therefore, they prefer the word 'gaming' over 'gambling' [36, p. 178]
Indeed, for example, the official representative body of the United States gambling industry is still
today named as the American Gaming Association. When terminological confusions such as this are
vocally promoted by the industries themselves, it is not surprising that survey respondents provide
inconsistent interpretations about what gaming and gambling are.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks for the kind words! Tbh, I *think* the finding isn't as big as it first sounds, as a lot of general surveys are with kids & they don't gamble so much-- then again, papers often operate with diagnostic cutoffs which should be very strongly affected

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks Ian!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

It will still take decades before social sciences understand with what Wittgenstein tried teach them 70 years ago

bsky.app/profile/mkar...

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · Jan 17

Wittgenstein's hot take on psychological science remains accurate, timely, and unparalleled

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Cannot express how happy it makes to read that, coming from you-- the genuinely positive feedback in academia is so few compared to all days that go into work, it really means a lot!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks, better measurement practices will definitely be a first step for all progress!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

One problem is, they do often have some formal instruction, eg that from GDT which we used shown in the pic. This doesn't exclude online gambling-- but naturally changing the official description of a measure wouldn't be allowed..

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

Thanks Jamie!

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

as usual, fun working with @matusadamkovic.bsky.social @martoncik.bsky.social @yaewonjin.bsky.social

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

All past & future gaming measures should be revised to explicitly distinguish between gaming & gambling; all previous results should be reassessed in the light of the measurement error. Last: the issue influences studies in different ways, so implications are context specific.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

In sum: all global prevalence rates about gaming addiction/disorder seem to be a partial combination of both gaming *and* gambling prevalence. The same applies to other studies, which use gaming measures in relevant languages. Chinese seems to be a major exception.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 10d

behold, we found great variation in how people think! Many activities that we thought would be “gaming” weren't & vice versa, eg half of the participants interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’. Ergo: surveying ‘gaming’ without defining it creates data mess

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