The phrase “the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs and social media is just as addictive” is very unclear.

Very few people know what dopaminergic means. It might not be a real word.

“Is not dissimilar from” is a stock phrase used in an academia and by people trying to sound very smart.

The poster included just enough technobabble and stock phrasing to imply they are a specialist. But specialists know when speaking to non-specialists you should avoid technical language and stock phrasing.

So it really just seems the poster was signaling “I am very smart and possibly have a degree in something related and a current on research.”

"Dopaminergic effects" clearly means something along the lines of 'activity of dopamine within the human brain'. I just think we need more than an analogy to reach the conclusion that social media needs to be banned. The sentence "the dopaminergic effects of exercise are not dissimilar to drugs" is equally as true. Clearly dopaminergic effects alone aren't enough to ban something.

When I read that the top comment thought banning social media was clearly necessary I was flabbergasted. I read the comment multiple times looking for a compelling argument. I read the article multiple times looking for a compelling argument too. I'm still struggling on this.

I would really like to read a concise logical argument for why we should ban social media.

If you're interested in the topic, Jonathan Haidt has written a fair bit on this.

He's got a number of articles if you Google his name, and he's also appeared in a few podcasts (eg Lex Fridman's).

I'm not a specialist and I'm not in academia. I just sometimes listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast.

Dopaminergic literally means "related to dopamine". It's the first Google result.

And how is the word "dissimilar" academic technobabble?

Let's have good-faith discussions in future as I think this is a really interesting topic :)

> It might not be a real word.

It is a real word though.