Did you? Sure, it quotes a study, but its otherwise a bunch of quotes from one of the study authors, an author who has a definite idea of what to blame:

Smart phones, and nothing else. Let's hope he's better at conducting studies than he is at staying abreast of current events, but yeah, this non-sense is close to cream-of-the-crop for the ~~Scientific American~~livescience.com "articles" that are always cluttering my Lemmy feed. Okay, so I confused one site for another, but we should demand better of more respectable sites, as well as round-filing the utter garbage.

[–] iltoroargento@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is my main issue with this type of journalism as well. The one author of the paper comes off as flippantly myopic and that's partially due to the way the article itself is written. If dude doesn't have a really informed view of the underlying causes of the data being observed, don't just throw some dumb quote he pulled out of his ass into the article lol.

It's increasingly difficult to find articles that pose deeply thought out questions and analyses when every writer is pressured to produce something that satisfied their editors' want for a story with a quick answer that doesn't rock the boat or upset shareholders.

[–] memfree@beehaw.org 4 points 1 month ago

Could be worse. Could be an Elsevier site (Lancet, Cell, ScienceDirect, etc.).

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It literally says "We don't fully know yet, but this is what we think in the meantime with what we do know". I mean, the first 5 words in your screenshot are "There is no definitive consensus", which is a far cry from "smart phones, and nothing else". I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with that, or how that falls into "opinion piece" territory.

[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 month ago

No, dude literally said at the end that he had no idea what else would be the cause. That's a pretty damn strong opinion in the face of everything that's happened in recent decades.