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Too Much Tech Diminishes Work Relationships?

Posted by michael on from the too-much-salt-spoils-the-soup dept.

Lansdowne writes "The Seattle Times has an article today on Tim Sanders, a Yahoo exec who claims too much technology may be bad for your health. According to Sanders, small groups of engineers who went to completely electronic communication in their workgroups became 'very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people.'"

1 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Correlation != Cause and Effect by kakos · · Score: 5, Informative

    As many people have already pointed out, there is simply a correlation between technology and unhappy, depressed, anti-social geniuses. This is the easiest mistake a person can make when looking at correlations.

    As any beginning psychology student can (should) tell you is that a correlation does not indicate a cause and effect. So, from this, we see that unhappy, depressed, anti-social geniuses use a lot of technology. We have a strong positive correlation between technology and depressed geniuses. It could be that technology causes it, or it could be that depressed geniuses like technology, or it could just be a coincidence.

    In order figure out which it is, experiments need to be performed. Observation alone cannot figure this out.