[HN Gopher] School smartphone ban results in better sleep and im...
___________________________________________________________________
School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood:
study
Author : jonatron
Score : 928 points
Date : 2024-12-14 23:51 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.york.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.york.ac.uk)
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| I feel like smartphones should be banned but
|
| > On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than
| before the ban,
|
| 20 minutes seems like kind of a small impact.
| jonatron wrote:
| To finish that sentence:
|
| > , and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.
|
| An hour seems like kind of a big impact.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| " sleep. On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster
| than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra
| rest each night. "
|
| An hour of extra rest does seem significant. Also averages
| without standard deviations are yucky.
| meow_mix wrote:
| 4% is a pretty big lift imo
|
| And who knows how good it is for the quality of that sleep
| hammock wrote:
| Indeed, four times greater than the absolute risk reduction
| of sever illness or death provided by the Covid vaccine (Nb:
| among adults), which was also mandated in many places
|
| And the connection between sleep quality and early death is
| very well documented
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense to compare the raw percentage
| of two completely different things. Especially when one is
| a percent change, and the other one is a percent risk.
|
| There's a ton of health numbers that work out to 4%. Or 1%.
| Some of them have massive impacts on your life, and some of
| them are basically negligible.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 20 mins is actually pretty big. The difference between
| chronically sleeping 20 minutes less than you need, and always
| getting the rest you need really does add up quite
| significantly, especially when it comes to learning and the
| ability to pay attention.
| tecoholic wrote:
| Next para says
|
| > 50 minutes earlier during the phone ban weeks compared to the
| week before the phone ban
|
| That's a big improvement. Combined with them falling asleep
| faster, that seems like an hour of extra sleep at least.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| If it's the daily average then it's a considerable impact
| verteu wrote:
| I found a couple interesting papers/preprints on smartphone bans:
|
| - https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/906
|
| - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240
|
| But I wasn't able to find a detailed writeup of this particular
| experiment (It seems to be more of a TV show than a scientific
| study?)
| slow_typist wrote:
| Just drop them a line and ask whether they plan to publish
| their research in a more formal way.
|
| In my experience scientists respond pretty well.
|
| https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/lh/#pu...
| irjustin wrote:
| Yea this is pretty annoying how hard it is to discover the
| sample size and methodology.
|
| Is this even published/peer reviewed or did it just go to TV?
|
| I'm extremely skeptical of accepting results/conclusions at
| face is this whole thing is around a show?
| eru wrote:
| Forcing every adult to exercise 30 minutes a day would probably
| also have positive health outcomes. But would that be a good
| enough reason to introduce such a policy?
| m00x wrote:
| It would be almost impossible to enforce.
|
| School smartphone ban has an obvious way to be enforced since
| it gives teachers the ability to do what they've wanted to do
| all along.
| standardUser wrote:
| In US schools most students are forced to exercise about 30
| minutes per day during gym class. I had this from at least
| 6th-10th grade, though maybe only a handful of days per week
| had any serious exercise, usually running or playing sports
| like soccer or basketball.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Not in any schools I attended or have had children in. You
| got gym maybe 1 to 2 times a week. In elementary school you
| were expected to run around during recess. In middle school
| and high school we had a proper gym class 3 days a week.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Something something "my body my choice"
|
| The mere thought of someone advising them would be literal
| hell.
| drekipus wrote:
| Yes absolutely
| card_zero wrote:
| I would make use of the increase in my strength and stamina to
| be very vigorously angry about being forced to exercise.
| yapyap wrote:
| It would, but when you reach a certain age these institutions
| dont have power over you anymore to such an extent and when
| reintroduced to being as controlled as people were when they
| were back in school but in their adult lives at their older age
| they tend to freak out.
|
| Yes 30 minutes of exercise a day and other "law" like one
| preventing people from overeating to where they wouldn't be
| able to walk anymore would be wildly positive but seeing as
| it'd impose on the freedom to be unhealthy it would not work.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| It's been a thing in Japan off and on for a few decades at
| least resulting in fewer sick days. [1] I could see commercial
| gym's being upset if this were implemented. In the US and EU it
| would probably have to be voluntary at first with really good
| incentives to get people into it and would probably have to
| remain voluntary for one or two generations.
|
| I think a harder challenge would be to get rid of all the bad
| foods and snacks. Facebook might be a good place to test
| removing bad foods given how many people live there and never
| leave. I can not even begin to imagine the incentives that
| would be required for people to adopt it.
|
| [1] - https://www.trtworld.com/life/japanese-companies-
| introduce-e...
| nerdponx wrote:
| > In the US and EU it would probably have to be voluntary at
| first with really good incentives to get people into it and
| would probably have to remain voluntary for one or two
| generations.
|
| Health insurance companies already offer gym reimbursements.
| But that doesn't matter if you have a bad diet and bad sleep
| and spend too much time working or commuting, and don't feel
| well enough to benefit from a gym membership.
|
| Heck, there's literally a free gym in the office building
| where I work, but few people use it because they are busy
| working during the work day.
| card_zero wrote:
| You're fucking serious?
|
| I already get worn out physically by the thing I do for a
| living. I negotiated delicately to keep the amount of it I do
| to a minimum so that I can also do the things I regard as
| real life, which take place in bed with my laptop. If the
| government forces a mandatory half-hour of exercise on me I
| _will_ get militant. I 'm not gonna be frogboiled into
| accepting it, either.
|
| One-size-fits-all solutions suck donkey balls.
|
| Do they really have compulsory exercise in Japan? You say
| "off and on" ... so, I'm guessing, currently off?
|
| Oh, from the link, it's mandated by the _company you work
| for._ That would select for office workers, and possibly fits
| Japan best considering the culture of being always in the
| office (asleep).
| hammock wrote:
| In my family, absolutely.
|
| In my workplace, they pay you $$ for submitting step counter
| data, etc.
|
| In my church, the run club that encourages this has been great.
|
| At my country club, the "challenges" they release every month
| similarly have been great and the vast majority of the
| community participates in them competitively.
|
| Do you mean federal policy (for some odd reason)?
| mcmoor wrote:
| Funnily there are some Japanese and Chinese companies forcing
| employees to do aerobic in the morning
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I think the Japanese ones are more about team building and
| stretching before physical labour jobs, and less about
| cardiovascular health.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Typical hn comment. Spin a good effect as no different than
| coming from another cause and then argue how it should not be
| made into a rule. False equivalence.
| dabbledash wrote:
| No. Because it's inappropriate to treat adults like children.
| Ponet1945 wrote:
| why?
| andrepd wrote:
| "Adult" being the crucial word here. I also can't tell adults
| to eat veggies but I can my kids :)
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Say what you like about Noam Chomsky, but I recall him once
| saying that it is OK to cover children as their parent,
| presumably to build good habits. Thinking back about my
| childhood, I am sure that my parents did similar, to much
| benefit to me as an adult!
| supersrdjan wrote:
| What do you mean cover?
| bdangubic wrote:
| once you are adult you can claim "oh my freedom" and all that
| stuff... kids have no such luxury, it is on
| parents/teachers/community/policy/... to get them as best we
| can to adulthood and hence these two are not comparable. should
| we let kids snort coke during recess might be though (we don't)
| lmm wrote:
| Banning something that you ban for adults as well is
| defensible. Insisting kids follow a standard of "healthy"
| that you won't apply to yourself smacks of hypocrisy and
| bullying.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you cannot possibly be serious, right? no "learn from my
| mistakes eh?"
|
| if I am a heavy smoker, heavy drinker etc I have to make
| sure my 11-year old lights up with me and cracks open a
| bottle after a long day in school...?
|
| still hoping you are joking though...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They're not making the argument you think they are.
|
| They are saying leaving by example is a good tool. They
| are not saying that every single rule must be symmetric
| caseyy wrote:
| Deliberately introducing it as a cultural change would probably
| significantly increase life satisfaction (through prolonging
| healthspan and lifespan both) and have positive effects on the
| economy. Cultures that value exercise (mainly Asian examples
| come to mind) benefit from all these things.
| inerte wrote:
| This is a false equivalency. We already take away many things
| from adults.
| aorloff wrote:
| I have a feeling certain religions are onto something in this
| area.
| yapyap wrote:
| not surprised honestly, a ban on smartphones in the workplace is
| also in place in most retail establishments due to productivity
| reasons
| talldayo wrote:
| If you work in retail, smartphones are not the bottleneck of
| your productivity.
| hooverd wrote:
| no, it's just bosses being petty tryants
| m00x wrote:
| I feel like giving teachers and schools more freedoms to
| implement these things would be a great overall effect.
|
| We've seen a large reduction of what teachers are able to do in
| the last few decades because the school districts have
| continuously pushed bad policies to protect them against
| liability and extra work. My parents were both in the school
| system and every year they would get more rules to protect the
| district by pushing more work onto them.
|
| The school system has a lot of similarities to have Boeing has
| been run recently. The board and admins make all the decisions
| while the people who deliver the value get the short end of the
| stick.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| An important component is solving parent entitlement as well.
| They are stakeholders, not customers.
|
| (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day
| weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
| hammock wrote:
| > An important component is solving parent entitlement as
| well. They are stakeholders, not customers.
|
| Only in public schools. At private schools, they are
| customers, and paradoxically the concomitant "entitlement" is
| not a bug, but a feature
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Private school cohort is a minority, and those kids in the
| aggregate will do well because of their parents' wealth,
| income, and time available. Private school teachers
| typically are compensated appropriately and empowered as
| well (as opposed to public teachers who are not). Managing
| expectations, but also realistic expectations.
|
| (home/virtual school two kids under 10 in our family, my
| observations and perspective from interacting with both
| public and private schools and the parents there, ymmv)
| airstrike wrote:
| The student-to-teacher ratio there is also wildly
| different. For example, it's 4:1 at one school in New
| York[1] vs. the 15:1 national average (it's 12:1 in New
| York)
|
| [1]: https://www.stbernards.org/about-us/faculty--staff
|
| [2]: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-
| society/education/k-...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I strongly agree that ratios are a component in student
| success. Regardless, if parents are not meeting their
| burden as stakeholders, student success is incredibly
| challenging. This applies across income strata.
|
| TLDR "Do you value education and model that for your
| children?" (broadly speaking)
|
| My apologies this was a long journey to the thesis.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2973328/
|
| https://touroscholar.touro.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl
| e=1... (page 6)
| polygon87 wrote:
| Anecdotal but I went to a fancy NYC private school (on
| financial aid) and what I heard was the teachers actually
| got paid less than public school teachers + lacked the
| union protections and whatnot. But it was worth it for
| the nicer environment and dealing with motivated students
| with parental pressure behind them.
|
| Although you could make money in extra ways by networking
| with students for $300/hr SAT tutoring and such.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yes, my friend is a teacher in WA and taught in private
| and public schools; that matches her experience.
| balderdash wrote:
| That was true, I believe though that they also didn't
| have to do as much certification, but were also often
| better pedigreed (e.g. the math teacher may not have done
| a teacher prep program or been certified, but held a
| masters degree in math from a prestigious university)
| yndoendo wrote:
| I think you are a little bit behind the times with
| current private/ charter schools. Charter School does not
| mean wealthy parents, it means non-public alternative
| that takes the public tax dollars and turns them private.
|
| Private/ charter schools work off the fallacy that
| smaller school means better performance. They exploit the
| law of small numbers to support the fallacy. There will
| be one or two schools that do well while 1000 do not.
| Those that promote charter schools only talk about the
| two doing well as their example of why charter is good
| and pretend the other 1000 don't exist.
|
| "Thinking, Fast and Slow", by Daniel Kahneman has a quick
| talk about this. Simple probability proves small /
| private schools are not good. Where are you more likely
| to find a mentor, in a school with 10 teachers or 200
| teachers? Where are you more likely to find a friend, in
| a school with 50 or 5000 people? Where are you more
| likely to find a doctor, in a restaurant with 5 or 500
| people? Where are you more likely to find a great walking
| stick, on the beach or in a forest?
|
| There are less financial regulations and requirements for
| monetary rules with private than public. Those that run
| private schools exploit this for personal financial gain.
| "Education entrepreneurs" that can get a company car and
| use other tax evasive actions versus focusing on the
| education of the next generations.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I cannot speak to charter schools, I have no experience
| with them, only public and private (no vouchers accepted,
| some financial aid available depending on income).
| lofenfew wrote:
| > Where are you more likely to find a mentor, in a school
| with 10 teachers or 200 teachers? Where are you more
| likely to find a friend, in a school with 50 or 5000
| people?
|
| This is such nonsense. Beyond a certain (very low)
| number, the number of people at the school doesn't help
| you with those things, because you can only meet so many
| people. You have classes with a fixed number of teachers,
| and a fixed number of students in each class.
| Furthermore, it's usually roughly the same cohort in each
| class. So even at a school of 5000 people, you only
| productively meet a small fraction anyways. Besides that,
| the premise is seemingly that a good school is one where
| you can find a maximally good mentor and friend. But
| schools are for teaching things, so ensuring you can find
| a slightly better mentor or friend at best marginally
| improves the school as a school. If the charter school is
| better than a public school in some other dimension, then
| that will surely overshadow this miniscule effect.
|
| You've seemingly borrowed an argument for larger cities
| and applied it to schools without understanding it. If I
| am lacking something in a small town, I either put up
| with it, or move to another town where I will surely lack
| something else. If I lack something at a school, I have
| the choice to switch schools to one where I am better
| provided for (assuming I'm given that option) or find
| something to supplement that lack outside of school (say
| a club, sports team, etc).
| yndoendo wrote:
| >You've seemingly borrowed an argument for larger cities
| and applied it to schools without understanding it.
|
| I don't know that argument and never heard it.
|
| Intellectual sorting will be applied in a real world.
|
| By saying you have to meet all 200 teachers or 5000
| students to find a mentor or friend would mean you have
| to try on all shoes, or cloths at a store to find the
| proper one(s). Your shoe, shirt, and pants size, with
| your acceptance of brands, greatly reduces the "you can
| try on only so many shoes, shirts, pants" argument. [0]
|
| Is the student into robotics? Most likely only a STEM
| teacher would be into robotics, which reduces the number
| of teachers to meet to find a mentor. See a person
| wearing a shirt for a band you like, more passive
| intellectual filtering to find a friend and reduce the
| number of people to interaction with to find a friend.
| Into beat-boxing, perform at the school talent show and
| communicate to all 200 and 5000 students at once. You
| still might be the only one into beat-boxing though. More
| Intellectual filtering that go against "having to meet
| everyone to find a friend or mentor" argument.
|
| Say you want to go out to a movie and there are 100 movie
| theaters in your area. Will you go to each one to find
| the right theater and movie? Or will you start sorting
| based on physical distance, known history, online
| checking of movies the theater is playing and times? Will
| you stop once you found something to go and see after
| viewing the 3rd theater or will you look and analyze all
| 100?
|
| Dating apps, meet-up apps, social media channels or
| groups, even Hacker News, are all forms of Intellectual
| filtering, to assist in the "lacking something else"
| bonding.
|
| Lets rephrase it. Say you want to have sex. Which would
| most likely help you reach that objective? Which has a
| high problematical outcome to achieve what you want,
| asking 10 people or asking 100 to have sex?
|
| [0] I have abnormal size feet. As a kid, only found shoes
| that fit at stores with the larger product selection that
| sold only shoes. Had to try on countless number to find a
| single pair that fit. This feed my disdain for shoe
| shopping. As an adult, purchase them online because not
| even Nike sells my size, and I don't have to waste days
| trying multiple on.
| lofenfew wrote:
| > Is the student into robotics? Most likely only a STEM
| teacher would be into robotics, which reduces the number
| of teachers to meet to find a mentor. See a person
| wearing a shirt for a band you like, more passive
| intellectual filtering to find a friend and reduce the
| number of people to interaction with to find a friend.
| Into beat-boxing, perform at the school talent show and
| communicate to all 200 and 5000 students at once. You
| still might be the only one into beat-boxing though. More
| Intellectual filtering that go against "having to meet
| everyone to find a friend or mentor" argument.
|
| I would say that running this "intellectual sorting" over
| schools themselves is far more productive then running it
| over individuals in a school. Suppose you find a really
| good friend at a school, who happens to not share any of
| your classes; or a mentor who happens to not teach any of
| your requirements. Going to a school in which most people
| have already passed a basic filter for compatibility
| would leave you far better off than running that filter
| over every person in a school. Like having a shoe store
| only for people with large feet.
| bdangubic wrote:
| except customer is not always right at private schools, the
| school makes the rules, you get to sign the agreement and
| then pay a bunch of money and the stfu. my kid goes to
| private school, no electronics of any kind are allowed.
| over the years many parents bitched about it which went as
| good as you can imagine - "there are many other options for
| your child's education..."
| ipaddr wrote:
| You have to get all the parents onboard and have other
| options.
| bdangubic wrote:
| absofuckinglutely NOT. parents are fucking idiots. you
| start asking parents shit and you end up with "oh this
| book should not be in the library."
|
| the way it should work (and it does in many private
| schools I scouted for my kid) is that school sets the
| rules, you sign the rulebook - end of the story. no
| discussion and 1,000,000% no parent involvement of ANY
| kind
| arrowsmith wrote:
| If I could afford to send my kids to private school, I
| would happily pay a premium for a school with a strict
| anti-phone-policy. Not least because I'd want to find a
| place where the other parents are on the same side as me on
| this issue.
| gus_massa wrote:
| What happens if both parents work?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You do the best you can, but you're likely setup for
| failure.
|
| As a parent in the trenches, I do not recommend children to
| anyone who is not fully prepared and informed for twenty
| years of a form of hardship.
|
| https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-
| pressu...
| Sajarin wrote:
| Blaming the "system" is easy but is it the whole picture?
|
| How much of it is due to culture? Teachers in western countries
| are not as respected as teachers in other parts of the world. A
| few teachers abuse their authority and that results in outrage
| and lawsuits from parents, rightfully so.
|
| I can imagine in many schools in the US, if a cellphone ban
| were to be implemented, there would be a large outcry from
| parents on how restrictive or overreaching that policy would
| be. Even if the net positives (as shown in the article) are
| proven to outweigh the pragmatic concerns (i.e I might need to
| be in communication with my child) why take the risk?
|
| Not to be supporter of "the man" but it seems unfair to point
| the finger at a system that takes steps to preserve itself
| without also acknowledging the hostile environment in which it
| operates.
|
| Parents have greater zeal in suing the school than they have in
| attending open board meetings.
| threeseed wrote:
| I wouldn't group all Western countries together.
|
| The US has always been unique in having a very libertarian,
| freedom at all costs culture.
|
| For example in Australia we have recently banned children
| from using social networks and this was supported by about
| 80% of the population.
| graemep wrote:
| Is there no resistance to things like having to adult
| having to prove their age to social networks? How is that
| going to be done, BTW?
| threeseed wrote:
| The same way it has been done for years when you sign up
| for a mobile plan etc.
|
| You verify your age using either passport, driver's
| license, digital ID etc.
|
| There are plenty of services that provide this.
| eimrine wrote:
| > Teachers in western countries are not as respected as
| teachers in other parts of the world.
|
| It can not be true for most of Asian countries with a really
| rich history of beating bad students.
| bawolff wrote:
| We're talking about banning cell phones all day (not just
| during school hours).
|
| I don't think teachers should control what kids do outside of
| school. Teachers aren't parents (or jailers).
| blitzar wrote:
| > giving teachers and schools more freedoms
|
| Sounds like socialism (/s)
| cyberax wrote:
| We need to remove technology out of the school entirely (outside
| of computer science classes).
|
| No iPads instead of books, only manual note-taking, regular
| blackboards/whiteboards instead of projectors, no calculators,
| and so on.
| Wool2662 wrote:
| Non of that paper stuff! Stone tablets only.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Would abaci be too high tech?
| caseyy wrote:
| "You won't always have an abacus in your pocket."
| bawolff wrote:
| Abaci would actually probably be good for making mental
| math come naturally.
|
| As a general rule, i am on team - if you need a calculator
| in math class then you aren't learning math.
| thfuran wrote:
| Because if you're studying real math, a calculator
| wouldn't help?
| cyberax wrote:
| Pretty much. You either do every calculation
| symbolically, or you need a full-blown computer for
| numeric methods.
| bawolff wrote:
| Either that, or you are trying to teach people
| arithmatic, in which case having them do it by hand is a
| benefit.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| We learned to use them in elementary school (1970s)!
|
| It was what I think they now call a "manipulative" as way
| to teach place value, addition, and multiplication.
| cyberax wrote:
| An interesting question, actually. It feels like they can
| be a good teaching tool, compared to calculators.
| cyberax wrote:
| No. Paper and handwriting is great.
| doug_durham wrote:
| For a subset of the population who are manually adept.
| Excluding modalities from school isn't productive.
| cyberax wrote:
| You become manually adept by practicing.
|
| And of course, people who physically can't write need to
| have specialized curriculae. Just like we have them for
| deaf or dyslexic kids.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 100% agree for elementary school, probably up until high school
| even.
| chollida1 wrote:
| In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any
| issue at all this year.
|
| My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't
| have a phone during class hours. When I asked why their main
| issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how
| would they text their parents to say they were ok when their
| school had a shooting.
|
| Which just goes to show how much your environment affects your
| thinking. I've never once thought or even considered there could
| be a school shooting at a school here.
| myko wrote:
| yep, my kids HS has a cloth rack hanging on the door to place
| phones in so the kids can grab them when a shooting is
| happening but doesn't have them during class
| ipaddr wrote:
| How often is their a school shooting when this would be
| useful?
| tbihl wrote:
| It hasn't happened yet, but if it did, then it still
| wouldn't be useful.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Honestly this is really sad
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their
| lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok
| when their school had a shooting.
|
| If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case
| of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I
| heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard
| though.
| Cpoll wrote:
| You can't send messages with an old-fashioned pager. (There
| are two-way pagers, but I don't think those were ever
| common).
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| According to my daughter, the Ontario ban had little effect on
| her high school. Before the ban, some teachers allowed phones,
| some didn't. After the ban, some teachers allow phones and some
| don't. Many teachers use internet resources in their classroom,
| and phones are how the students access those. There are
| Chromebooks available, but not enough for everybody, and they
| are in rough shape.
|
| And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as
| before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the
| provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.
| bdangubic wrote:
| this sounds possibly like a whole lot of things but "ban" is
| not one of them - maybe something like Ontario "you can do
| whatever teacher says" thing
| getnormality wrote:
| Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such
| a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to
| organize their daily activities around that possibility,
| regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning
| environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?
| ta988 wrote:
| Yes it is really part of the thought processes of people I
| have met too. Really strange how the reality can be distorted
| to make room for guns.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| When you do active shooter drills during school three or four
| times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a
| skewed perspective on the real risk.
|
| Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or
| cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the
| situation in any way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can
| or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter
| the situation in any way.
|
| Yea this is what I don't get. How is a cell phone actually
| going to help when there's a school shooter? I guess you
| can throw the phone at his head. There's pretty much no
| reason a kid needs a phone in school. If the parent needs
| to get in touch with him they can call the office like in
| the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
| bdangubic wrote:
| they have phones in closets where kids are hiding parents
| can call to make sure their child is still breathing?!
|
| I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly
| argument to make. every parent of a child in America
| worries every day something may happen and when it does
| time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time
| no parent should have to live through
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm a parent and the last thing I'd want, if heaven
| forbid there was a school shooter, would be my kid (or
| any kid) talking on their cell phones or having the
| phones ringing and making noise that might cause the
| shooter to go investigate. A parent can literally do
| nothing about the situation over the phone.
| tbihl wrote:
| I have a very particular set of skills...
| bdangubic wrote:
| spoken like a true parent, albeit irresponsible one...
|
| this situation is also rehearsed - phone on silent, text
| only, safe words ... hope you never need to be prepared
| for it
| quesera wrote:
| This is a terrifying way to raise children.
|
| I.e. it sounds like you've terrified your children.
|
| Why would you do that?
| bnj wrote:
| Yes, New York State is considering some form of cell phone
| restrictions in schools from the State level and there's
| substantial push back from parents who object that they need
| their kids to have a cell phone for safety reasons like a
| school shooting.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Replace shooting with fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, etc
|
| IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help
| translate.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes do not happen several
| times a week in the US, unlike mass shootings.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Are you talking about at schools or generally?
|
| Both happen several times per week, neither happen several
| times per week at schools.
| bnj wrote:
| This source [0] says 81 school shootings in the US as of
| 12/6/24, so while not quite several times per week on
| average, it's within the margin of error.
|
| [0]: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-
| dg/index....
| tbihl wrote:
| You're being down voted because your source links known
| disinformation sites (detailed elsewhere in the thread.)
| zdragnar wrote:
| As an American, I'm at a loss trying to figure out when phones
| started being allowed in school.
|
| Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker
| except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers
| and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one,
| phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and
| Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones.
|
| Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the
| change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and
| despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even
| today.
| ubj wrote:
| Also as an American, my experience was that the majority of
| high school students didn't care about the rules on phones. I
| attended high school when Motorola Razr flip phones were the
| hot new technology, and kids used them in class all time.
| People learned how to do T9 texts without looking so they
| could slip their hand into a backpack or pocket during class.
| There were even ringtones high pitched enough that adults
| typically didn't hear them. All of this under the threat of
| phones being confiscated if caught.
|
| I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there
| have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among
| students rather than simply banning them.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their
| use among students rather than simply banning them.
|
| Arguably those have all been tried, and don't work.
|
| I think it's not hard to imagine why algebra may be less
| captivating than a constant short-form-video dopamine
| stream for an adolecent.
| bdangubic wrote:
| rare as in 1,200+ in the last 4 years...
| https://k12ssdb.org/all-shootings
|
| that's about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything
| else
| zdragnar wrote:
| And the vast majority of those are accidental, drive by,
| and "escalation of dispute" per your link. These are not
| the kinds of shootings that parents want kids to be texting
| about, these are run of the mill gang activity.
|
| The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where
| anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception,
| not the norm.
| bdangubic wrote:
| guessing you just might not be a parent yet...
| zdragnar wrote:
| When you live in a city with lots of crime and there's a
| shooting in the parking lot of the school at one in the
| morning, it's not really something that needs an urgent
| text from the kids.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I definitely agree. If my kid went to school in south
| side chicago I'd get bored getting texts 291 times per
| day, yea
| zdragnar wrote:
| I think you've missed my point.
|
| Yes, I want to know these things happen.
|
| No, they are not such an emergency that my kid needs to
| be taking time from class to text me about it.
|
| Most schools in areas with lots of crime or gang activity
| have metal detectors and other security at the doors.
| Violence is happening off hours, or between gang members
| either off campus (but close enough to warrant bringing
| people inside) or at the edges.
|
| In a country with hundreds of millions of people, a
| thousand over four years is not exactly a rounding error
| given that it is concentrated in a few areas, but still
| close enough that the vast majority will never experience
| it in their lives.
| bdangubic wrote:
| this is a good thing I can talk to my kid about...
| there's this Earth and on this Earth there is this
| Country where based on number of people that live there
| vast majority will not experience being gunned down in
| what should be 2nd safest place you can be. no other
| country on Earth has these issues, even ones that are 5x+
| size of this one. But you know, statistically speaking
| you should technically be OK...
| quantumfissure wrote:
| Please keep in mind, these lists are usually completely
| arbitrary and have very loose definitions of "school
| shootings", based around the usual theatrics of security
| and terror theater.
|
| Some examples that have been on these lists in the past:
|
| - A school resource officers firearm that accidentally went
| off when a child hugged around his waist. No injuries
| (there are other questions, but doesn't qualify in the same
| way)
|
| - An empty .22 casing found in a random school parking lot,
| probably fell out of a car or got caught in a boot or
| similar.
|
| - A gang fight at 1am on a Saturday near to school
| property.
|
| - My personal favorite: The two schools closest to me that
| showed up on one of the lists (Everytown, I believe?)
| because the police were dealing with an active robbery
| situation about 1/2 mi away and they asked the schools to
| go into lockdown. Apparently "lockdown" immediately and
| only ever means schools shooting.
|
| - 2/3rd of school shootings that NPR couldn't verify
| happened.[1] [1]
| https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-
| sch...
| basisword wrote:
| >> Please keep in mind, these lists are usually
| completely arbitrary and have very loose definitions of
| "school shootings"
|
| While I get your point, I think when you have to be
| concerned about how 'school shooting' is defined your
| country has a big problem.
| bdangubic wrote:
| amen :) when you start weeding through thousands of
| things to find "silver lining" you have already lost (US
| has lost all sense of protecting our children a long time
| ago and it is nonsense like this that is poisoning
| people's brains in defense of 2nd amendment (err gun
| lobbyists...)
| Izkata wrote:
| Their point is how much media hysteria hypes things up,
| and people from other countries accepting that distorted
| view of the country as normal here.
| warner25 wrote:
| > trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in
| school
|
| I was a high school senior in 2003-2004, and my dad gave me a
| phone to use that year, and I think most of my classmates had
| one too, but I don't actually remember there being any
| problem or policy about it. I assume that's because phones
| were just phones at the time, and who were you going to call
| during class? I don't think I even sent or received a text
| message until a couple years later.
|
| By 2011, when my wife started teaching in a public high
| school, it was the wild west with phones. The school policy
| gave her the authority to take them away during class, but
| then she was responsible for documenting and safekeeping
| them, so she didn't bother despite the constant distraction
| as kids openly looked at them during class.
|
| The capabilities and market penetration grew so fast that I
| think most schools were just caught off guard, trying in vein
| to implement rules after the phones were already in every
| kid's hand.
| Izkata wrote:
| I was around the same time as you, and I think the official
| rules for my school were simply that you can't use them in
| class. Exact repercussions left up to the individual
| teachers. Most didn't care unless it disrupted the class or
| was during a test, and a favorite for the class-disruption
| case was to answer the phone for the student and embarrass
| them.
| protocolture wrote:
| My only issue is that its baffling to me that you would deprive
| kids of a platform that is going to be relatively omnipresent
| in their lives.
|
| Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social
| apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling
| is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters
| somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.
| Aerroon wrote:
| This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to
| immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone
| bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the
| idea that _we shouldn 't ban things by default_.
|
| The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone
| knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes
| way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone
| knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?
|
| Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use _during class_ ,
| but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always
| "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be
| impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original
| article.
| graemep wrote:
| We ban lot of things for kids that they have to cope with
| in adult life.
|
| The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are
| few places where someone under 16 can buy it.
|
| Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems
| reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO
| we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
| tzs wrote:
| I didn't see anything about what the mechanism might be. Why
| would not having a smartphone in school affect sleep time, which
| I presume occurs at home?
|
| As a guess maybe without a smartphone the students pay attention
| more in class, which leads to them completing homework faster,
| meaning less having to stay up late for that? I'm guessing UK
| schools do give homework, because Hogwarts gives homework and I
| presume JK Rowling modeled Hogwarts after real UK school
| practice.
|
| Or maybe not having a smartphone directly improves mood, and
| people in a better mood have an easier time getting to sleep?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Doesn't screw up your dopamine system
| phire wrote:
| Because it wasn't a "smartphone ban".
|
| They convinced a group of students to give up their phones
| completely for 21 days, outside of school too. The reason why
| they went to bed sooner is somewhat obvious.
|
| It's not something you can replicate as a longer term policy,
| the students only participated because they knew it was short
| term and (presumably) they were rewarded for it.
|
| And I suspect the effects only work in the short term. You
| removed their primary source of distraction and they simply
| wasn't enough time to develop new distraction habits. When I
| was a teen, I distracted myself from bed with TV, books and the
| family desktop computer.
| gregwebs wrote:
| > challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their
| smartphones completely for 21 days.
|
| It was not a ban during school. It was complete phone abstinence.
| The result was that the kids got an entire additional hour of
| sleep! Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones
| away at night.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I have a longstanding hunch that the whole "teenagers need more
| sleep" thing is greatly exaggerated and it's just that teens
| just stay up too late because they're extreme stimulation
| seekers. Phones have made things worse, but we've had TVs, etc
| for a long time.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Teenage dogs need more sleep, too. I think it's a bit of
| both.
| boredatoms wrote:
| Its having to get up before noon thats the true problem, they
| just live in a different timezone
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I always laughed at the supposed benefit from moving high
| school start times an hour later with the claim that teens
| need more sleep. They'd need to move it three or four hours
| later; getting up at 8:00 instead of 7:00 is not a big
| difference when your body wants you to sleep for another
| three or four hours.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Was that based on anything? An hour of sleep is a big
| benefit. You'll feel a big difference if you give
| yourself six instead of five hours of sleep, or seven
| instead of six. Sleeping too late in the day isn't as
| high quality; sleep until 7am still is for most people.
| Students stay up late, but many aren't regularly staying
| up past 12. Plus, we do have to compromise with teachers
| who'd like to have dinner.
| atkailash wrote:
| I had a counselor or whatever once tell me I needed to
| "become" a morning person
|
| Now I'm 40 and I still am more functional after 10am than
| any time before that. And I've worked jobs starting at
| 4am-6am for months but never quite got used to it
| Spivak wrote:
| Yep 4am--1pm was my sleep schedule when I was in high
| school outside of school. During school it was 1am--5am
| during the winter due to sports conditioning and 1am-6:00am
| spring/fall. That was the earliest I could push my bedtime
| and still fall asleep.
|
| I used to fall asleep standing in the shower. Do not miss
| it in the slightest. Every day is a good day to not be in
| high school.
| tomrod wrote:
| Man, if my body was changing again so much that I was getting
| stretch marks, growing a few inches a quarter, and (for some)
| putting on 5s and 10s of pounds of muscle, fat, and bone, I'd
| imagine my metabolism would need sleep as well.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It's well documented that need for sleep continuously
| declines with age. However what you are saying is likely also
| true, which combine to make kids really sleep deprived.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Until what age?
|
| I've always seemed to need a lot of sleep. I'm a night-owl.
|
| For about 1 month, a few years back, I suddenly started
| waking up early, like 6am (in Winter). Had a couple of
| hours before anyone else was up. It was great. I didn't
| plan it, it just happened. And as easily as it arrived, it
| departed. I've tried to forcibly repeat it, but I just wake
| and feel awful, am super sleepy and get nothing done.
|
| Wish there were a switch.
|
| I can go to bed at 8pm, get 12 hours of sleep and still
| feel awful in the morning.
|
| I'm middle-aged, fwiw.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Peoples sleep duration on average gradually and steadily
| declines from as much as 11-19 hours as an infant, down
| to 5-8 on average for 65+. There is no rapid sudden drop,
| and possibly no age where it stops going down either.
|
| However, peoples individual need for sleep varies
| substantially on top of that, and can go up or down based
| on a lot of other factors. Medications, mental health,
| sleep apnea, diet, exercise, etc. can influence your need
| for sleep and how restful the sleep you get is.
|
| If you're sleeping 12 hours and still feeling awful,
| there is likely something very wrong you need to look
| into. I'd go to a doctor and get a sleep study, but if
| nothing else you can get a logging pulse oximeter, and/or
| sleep tracker like an Oura ring. It is possible you are
| not really sleeping but having short waking events,
| and/or apnea events from sleep apnea that is keeping your
| sleep from being restful.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Teenagers do need more sleep. They also naturally tend toward
| later hours. This phenomenon even extends to similar
| developmental phases in some other species.
|
| That said, the availability of artificial lighting, then the
| availability of TV, and now the availability of phones have
| made the problem exponentially worse by removing the natural
| boundaries that bracket out daytime hours.
|
| I have friends and family who are teachers. As they tell,
| there's an obvious bimodal distribution where some kids are
| going to bed at reasonable times and others are bragging
| about staying up to completely unreasonable hours. It's a
| badge of honor for some to barely sleep at night.
|
| Like most things it comes down to parental involvement. The
| gulf between students whose parents care and those who let
| their children do whatever they want is massive.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away
| at night.
|
| Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably
| save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Or if they just had parents controlling them?
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I read somewhere that being the only kid without smartphone
| access is worse (for mental health) than giving your kid a
| smartphone.
|
| I.e. there needs to be consensus among parents.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Perhaps what relate the study kids was their school,
| which is probably already existing I guess ?
| eimrine wrote:
| > I read somewhere that being the only kid without
| smartphone access is worse (for mental health) than
| giving your kid a smartphone.
|
| What is definition of worse in context of mental health?
| Can free and open-source devices help or proprietary
| software is inevitable?
| vaylian wrote:
| I suppose that is because of social exclusion. If all the
| important things are coordinates online and in real-time,
| then those kids can't participate. Communicating with
| your peers is much harder when the peer's baseline is
| "I'll just write a chat message" and it would take
| considerably more effort to talk to the kid who doesn't
| have mobile internet access.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Or C code wouldn't have any bugs if developers were more
| careful?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| There are important distinctions to be made between
| categories such as being unaware of the cause of a problem
| (likely many of the children), aware but unable to redress
| it (most gambling addicts), and intentionally choosing to
| make a tradeoff for various circumstantial reasons (many
| but certainly not all developers working in C).
| HPsquared wrote:
| There's a lot of inertia and social pressure in both
| phone use and language choice.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at.
|
| I doubt the children (or even their parents for the most
| part) realized the extent of the impact. Now that they're
| aware they have the option to attempt to mitigate it if
| they so choose. Of course they might try and fail (second
| case) or consciously choose to tolerate the downsides for
| some perceived gain (third case).
|
| As to language choice, inertia can be a perfectly valid
| reason. I strongly prefer writing Scheme but I generally
| choose to work in other languages due to the surrounding
| ecosystems.
|
| Social pressure is a very fuzzy term that can refer to
| any number of things. It could be "won't even stop to
| consider the possibility of using the new tool" or
| alternatively something more like "my coworkers aren't
| willing to entertain my idealism when it negatively
| impacts their ability to get things done".
| HPsquared wrote:
| I mean 's hard for an individual to go against what the
| rest of their peers are doing. The same applies to
| schoolkids as for programmers. There are a lot of costs
| to going against the crowd.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I think the implication is that there are parental
| authorities who can enforce this. Doesn't take much willpower
| when you've got people who will help you against your will!
| scythe wrote:
| As Hamilton and Madison wrote, "If angels were to raise
| children..."
| prisenco wrote:
| We underestimate how much the average parent recognizes the
| problem. My peers had children and put a tablet in their
| children's hands almost immediately. Despite many working
| in tech, who I assumed knew about the growing concerns.
|
| We are at the "doctor smokes a cigarette while giving you
| your lung cancer diagnosis" point in history.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Surely you mean overestimate?
| prisenco wrote:
| Yes, overestimate. Too late to edit.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| And when effective, double effect with children by building
| habits
| noduerme wrote:
| I too have had this sense of superiority about the negative
| outcomes of other people's addictive behavior. It's easy to
| blame people for not having willpower. But (and I say this as
| a former casino owner, former bartender, and someone who
| worked on early Facebook games trying to maximize
| engagement), even intelligent people with better than average
| self control are no match for the sophistication of systems
| that have been designed, studied, and iterated upon for the
| sole purpose of breaking down human self control. Looking at
| myself not being a degenerate gambler, drinker or social
| media user, I suspect it's only because I have first hand
| experience being on the other side of the table in all those
| cases. When people do congratulate themselves for their own
| willpower, they tend to have other issues and addictions
| which they hide from public view, and/or they are recovering.
|
| No one goes without being deceived in their lives. And
| teenagers with little experience are the easiest to deceive
| and to hook into addictive behaviors.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| I think bawolff was being sarcastic
| rlt wrote:
| I think moderne was agreeing with bawolf and responding
| to gregwebs' "Perhaps this could be replicated just by
| putting phones away at night."
| szszrk wrote:
| Which just shows that communicating through sarcasm
| brings more harm than benefit.
|
| I know, I'm guilty. Currently on "sarcasm rehab" for the
| sake of people around me and myself.
| gretch wrote:
| Some people think sarcasm makes for a smart and
| sophisticated joke.
|
| In reality, it takes very little intelligence to say the
| opposite of what you mean. Once I reflected on it, I
| really think it's such an adolescent way of thinking.
|
| If you think you're smart, then challenge yourself to
| make a great joke, instead of just saying !(thing).
| devmor wrote:
| That kind of sarcasm is not just saying the opposite of
| what you mean. It's an attempt to compel the reader into
| understanding their own flawed rationale by presenting an
| argument under the reader's pretense that is obviously
| flawed.
|
| An adolescent way of thinking would be deriding sarcasm
| as beneath you intellectually.
| gretch wrote:
| Great points! Why didn't I think of that? You must be way
| smarter than me!
| 2099miles wrote:
| This was an interesting post. Thanks for making me
| question if sarcasm is actually a bad thing. I don't
| agree off the bat but I've never seriously considered it.
| lowkeyokay wrote:
| Now I don't know if you're being sarcastic. Damn it!
| fifticon wrote:
| it is a risky gamble IMHO. (some) needy/vain people use
| it to 'prove' to themselves 'I am so close to person X
| that we understand each other so well that when I say the
| opposite they still understand me'. IE it's a bit like
| yanking a chain to prove it still holds.
|
| Problems with that.. people get tired of people
| continuing to yank chains for no good reason (cry wolf).
| And other people are busy with their own lines of thought
| and lives. So instead of the intended (wow we understand
| each other/so close!), 25% (* _) of the time instead the
| receiver thinks "hmm he's probably in a bad mood today?!"
| So, net effect is instead often to be viewed as grumpy
| moody.
|
| Famously, kids don't parse sarcasm well, neither at them
| or others. My grandfather, who was, in retrospect,
| actually rather cool, was viewed as semihostile by us
| kids, because he often phrased his terms of endearment
| sarcastically. Net result was that we thought he didn't
| like us much, merely tolerated us. That is what macho
| sarcasm got him.
|
| Now I am his age, with similarly bad habits. I guess my
| kids will end up sarcastic too.
|
| ( * *) A number I scientifically arrived at by pulling it
| directly from my posterior._
| Almondsetat wrote:
| a single anecdote doesn't "show" anything
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Those are 8 year olds. So there is at least the option that
| parents take the phone away at night.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Year 8 is 12-13 years old
| unparagoned wrote:
| Funny enough studies link night owls with having less self
| control
| gwervc wrote:
| That's not always a bad thing, especially when it's about
| things like "let's do this or read about that" instead of
| sleeping at a fixed hours. Might be a part of why night
| owls are more creative.
| brabel wrote:
| > Might be a part of why night owls are more creative.
|
| According to whom?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Thats a bad faith take. You are assuming that putting phones
| away at night does not mean that the phone is still in the
| same room.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Look, I am guilty of this. "Maybe people should eat less
| instead of popping Ozempic", etc. I have been on both ends of
| being an absolute rock and an addicted mess, so I can
| understand both sides.
|
| That said - one has to go through the initial hurdle of
| buying junk food, or getting a prescription for a drug
| instead of taking a hard look at their life style first.
|
| Phones are different. THEY ARE ALWAYS THERE, so resisting
| falling back into negative habit loops is never-ending, hard
| work.
|
| I've struggled with this, and I came up with some mind hacks:
| https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-
| back...
| sahmeepee wrote:
| Not really comparable because these are 12 year old children.
|
| Not only could the phones be put away at night, but
| universally available parental controls could be used to lock
| the phones at a specified time each night.
|
| We do this. It is just part of parenting, like deciding the
| time of bedtime.
| trogdor wrote:
| If you are saying that just based off of the linked article, I
| don't think that is clear.
| phire wrote:
| Seems clear enough to me:
|
| "challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their
| smartphones completely for 21 days."
|
| I'm not sure how you can read "completely" as "only during
| school time"
| _nivlac_ wrote:
| I found it unclear because the title of the article and the
| title of the TV show imply it's only during school, but
| it's only the second paragraph that it mentions
| "completely". It seems to contradict the opening sentences.
| phire wrote:
| My rule of thumb: If the headline and the body
| contradict, always trust the body (or even better, the
| peer reviewed journal article).
|
| Never trust headlines, they are optimised for clicks, not
| accuracy. It's also common for headlines to be written by
| someone other than the article body, someone who
| potentially only skimmed the article, and changed based
| on A/B testing.
|
| And TV show titles.... basically useless.
| sahmeepee wrote:
| The advertising for this on TV was also confusing in this
| regard.
|
| It's only because most UK secondary schools already ban
| phone use in school time that (in context) it obviously
| means round-the-clock.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Why does a group of Year 8 pupils (age 12-13) have
| smartphones in the first place?
|
| I don't know what age I'm giving my son a smartphone but
| it's sure as hell not as early as 12.
|
| "But my friends all have one"? Then I judge his friends'
| parents.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There's a lot of pressure on my youngest, at Primary
| School in the UK, to have a phone.
|
| Their friends have TVs and game consoles in their rooms
| too.
|
| For our kids, they have to travel on their own when they
| get to highschool, so a smartphone makes sense.
|
| Family controls are pretty good nowadays, fwiw.
| phire wrote:
| _> Family controls are pretty good nowadays, fwiw._
|
| Yeah, I do feel like people confuse "giving children
| their own smartphone" with "giving children unrestricted
| access to a smartphone". Parental controls really change
| the equation.
|
| And counterintuitively, giving children their own
| smartphone actually reduces risks, simply because you can
| enable family control on it.
|
| I'm not a parent myself, but as an uncle, I recently had
| to diagnose an android phone which had started popping up
| random ads. The diagnosis: parents will lend kids their
| smartphone, kids will install random free apps from play
| store, which are malicious. And Google provides
| absolutely no way to prevent kids from installing free
| apps, short of family control (there is a setting that
| prevents kids buying apps without a passcode). And you
| can't really put family control on your own phone, the
| concept of family control (and apple's parental controls)
| is designed around giving kids their own smartphone, and
| using the parent's smartphone to manage those
| restriction.
| andai wrote:
| I did a project once where I put my phone away before bed
| (switched off and in another room) and kept it off for the
| first few hours of the day, along with my wifi router.
|
| I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to
| keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed"
| to turn them back on.
| warner25 wrote:
| > along with my wifi router
|
| I'm all about eliminating phones, but I'm curious to know
| what you accomplished for several hours without network
| connectivity in general. Whether I've been working from home
| or in an office, a network outage basically meant taking the
| rest of the day off because nothing could actually get done.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I'm curious to know what you accomplished for several
| hours without network connectivity in general.
|
| Making your bed, organizing your room, taking a shower /
| getting a haircut, doing laundry, whatever. You know, the
| stuff people tend to get behind on.
| Aeolun wrote:
| People get behind on taking a shower? Amongst that list
| it seems the only one you can't skip out on.
|
| Unless you start putting on dirty laundry. That's
| probably worse.
| OJFord wrote:
| Depends what you mean by 'get behind on' I guess? I'm a
| 'morning' showerer, because my hair looks insane before a
| shower, but if there's nothing to particularly make me
| need/want to look presentable (obviously I'm not properly
| dressed having not showered either) particularly early
| then yeah I can get behind on showering.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It kinda blows my mind if not only have you never missed
| taking a shower but you can't even imagine a situation in
| which that mighty happen.
|
| That aside, people have depression, or no access to a
| shower, and so miss showering for weeks even. Amongst
| other reasons.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I find it hard to call something 'get behind on' if you
| have no ability to do it in the first place. Getting
| behind on something implies it is possible and you choose
| (conciously or unconciously) not to.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Presumably some of the other 1,000 things to be done.
|
| On my procrastination list right now: replace bathroom
| faucet, replace bathroom fan, replace belt in car, clean
| out garage floor, dust servers in my rack, move rack to new
| location, decommission old server in rack, clean wood
| floor, clean oven, caulk around the bathtub, finish reading
| about 20 books I have only read halfway through... could go
| on and on.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Most of that list would require me to have YouTube or
| something up explaining how to do to, so I'd need a
| network to be productive lol
| eimrine wrote:
| It will not help you because bathroom fans may have
| different ways to disassemble them, car belts may have
| different bolts position etc. You either can work with
| electricity wires or not, no third option, and the
| difference is mostly comes from having read or not having
| read the book (every country has a different one). For me
| the list is so boring that it requires me to have a
| device yelling some podcasts while I am solving such a
| mind-numbing issues.
| RussianCow wrote:
| > You either can work with electricity wires or not, no
| third option
|
| As someone who has used The Internet(tm) as a reference
| for more projects than I can count, I strongly disagree
| with this. There is definitely a middle ground where you
| know just enough to do some basic things on your own and
| feel comfortable venturing a bit deeper, but not without
| some help.
|
| > It will not help you because bathroom fans may have
| different ways to disassemble them, car belts may have
| different bolts position etc.
|
| I dunno, I can usually find at least one guide online for
| how to do a specific thing with a specific model of
| something. Search "change timing belt $year $make $model"
| and you'll get at least a handful of videos walking you
| through the whole process.
|
| Having said all of that, this entire discussion is a bit
| moot because it's easy enough to download YouTube videos
| or tutorials locally ahead of time and pull them up on a
| tablet without internet access.
| scott_w wrote:
| > Having said all of that, this entire discussion is a
| bit moot because it's easy enough to download YouTube
| videos or tutorials locally ahead of time and pull them
| up on a tablet without internet access.
|
| In theory, yes. In practice, I usually encounter new
| problems when fixing something that I need to learn. Kind
| of like Brian Cranston in Malcom in the Middle.
| latexr wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
| dbbljack wrote:
| is it so impossible to include a model number in your
| query?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm guessing this wasn't for a remote work day.
|
| Things I need to do tomorrow include oil change on my
| truck, laundry, trip to the hardware store, fix the sink,
| and call my parents.
|
| I don't need the Internet for any of those, and checking
| the news can social media when I roll out of bed won't help
| anything. At worst, it might derail my day.
| NiloCK wrote:
| ... writing code?
|
| git commits are local things.
| andai wrote:
| It was a solo project involving mostly creative work:
| curriculum design, game design, programming, writing
| tutorials.
|
| I found myself missing Google for language and API related
| questions frequently, so I used DevDocs, a website that can
| also "install" itself in the browser to work offline. For
| the stuff I couldn't find there, I just made a note to
| Google it after lunch and worked around it or switched
| tasks.
|
| Note that this was before LLMs got good at programming /
| saying mostly true things, so there was no loss from not
| having access to them. Recently I've been experimenting
| with local LLMs, though they're not quite there yet (the
| ones I can run at least), and they're already fun enough to
| be distracting!
| safety1st wrote:
| Yeah so the smartphones and socials can be difficult
| addictions to shake, but this is the flip side of it: when
| you do put them aside for an extended period of time you
| often see your productivity absolutely go through the roof.
|
| I started sticking my phone in my bag or in another room
| during my afternoon work session and my productivity with
| that time doubled, in terms of actual output - tasks
| completed, lines of code written etc. and probably better
| ideas generated.
|
| I started turning it off after dinner as well as running a
| simple script that blocks FB, Reddit etc. on my desktop - my
| "productivity" with my evening time also basically doubled,
| whether it was books read, games played, extra work done,
| time spent with people who matter, keeping my place cleaner,
| etc. just more life happening basically.
|
| The more hooked you are, the more massive the benefit of
| quitting cold turkey. Once you see it a couple times the
| dynamic inverts and it gets harder to go back.
|
| From personal experience, yeah of course if you rip the
| phones out of the kids' hands they're going to experience a
| variety of improvements... that's what happened when I ripped
| it out of my own hands.
|
| I do find it interesting that this study saw little in
| cognitive improvements - it was only a 21 day study. I thin
| they are there but they're a long burn, reading books for
| instance is a skill that has returned to me but it's been
| very slow and gradual, I should probably lean even harder
| into turning off my phone and any short-form socials trash.
| card_zero wrote:
| Damn, I should get my smartphone out of the bag and start
| using it, and develop a TikTok habit. Then I can put it
| away again, and my productivity will double!
|
| Which is to say that I find this claim highly unlikely.
| You're very lucky to have such immense latent productivity
| that was just waiting for the smartphone dam to burst.
| madmask wrote:
| I noticed something similar. Productivity does go up if
| you don't replace social media with other forms of
| entertainment. After a while one gets bored and starts
| doing more stuff, either work or hobbies
| safety1st wrote:
| You can choose not to believe me if you want. Yes,
| turning the phone off doubled my productivity.
|
| I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've
| ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their
| time on their phone at work.
|
| It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and
| deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of
| time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably
| goes into garbage content on the phone instead.
|
| I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that
| the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the
| ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see
| the value in it.
| 2099miles wrote:
| I don't get this comment. Double is common hyperbole, but
| like do you think tiktok habits don't degrade other
| productivity? It's a known phenomenon that smartphones
| kill boredom and boredom promotes things like sleeping
| and productivity.
| fakedang wrote:
| Smartphones kill boredom by replacing it with their own
| productivity killer.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Being interrupted by people at your desk is a known
| productivity issue. Why would phones be different ?
|
| When I work at home or during evenings when I can focus
| for long duration my productivity explodes.
|
| I have no issue believing the level of impact.
| andai wrote:
| You can waste time without a phone and you can do
| programming fairly productively on a phone (I lived
| without a laptop for 6 months, did everything in
| Termux!). But there's a right tool for every job, and the
| phone is designed to steal your soul (attention),
| designed to encourage mindless consumption, and interrupt
| you as often as possible.
|
| This is part of a bigger principle I've noticed where I
| can rely on sheer willpower, or I can simply make a small
| change to my environment (e.g. move the phone to another
| room) and that's a much more efficient way to achieve the
| same result.
|
| It's partly about reducing the Temptation, and partly
| about setting a strong intention / setting a strong
| message to yourself. If you're serious about getting some
| real work done, then why are you even looking at your
| phone?
|
| Eventually you can get to the point where wasting time in
| any way starts to feel gross and you catch yourself more
| and more, but for most people it takes a bit of
| recalibration to get there.
| mattlondon wrote:
| > books read, games played,
|
| So that is positive, but reading and playing games on a
| phone is negative?
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I'm not a specialist but I think someone having in its
| hand the same device they do other activities on, may
| trigger some habits they have/had on that same device.
| That doesn't refrain someone to be productive but not the
| easiest way.
| safety1st wrote:
| Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is
| harder and leads to worse retention. The content you
| consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually
| valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a
| phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and
| switching over to other activities, such as tapping
| useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into
| anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc. all
| generated by content that was designed for mobile users.
| Books don't do this.
|
| I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming
| reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of
| doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen
| activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling,
| and many of which are more useful.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually
| valuable? A book is a book regardless.
|
| Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off
| notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not
| rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a
| phone if you wanted)
| lazide wrote:
| Why would food at McDonalds be any nutritionally less
| valuable than food at home?! After all, food is food, and
| there is nothing stopping someone from having home cooked
| food at a McDonalds.
| hanifc wrote:
| Recently, the writing-by-hand vs typing debate has been
| getting some more press, with people saying that pen and
| paper leads to better retention while note taking. Could
| reading have similar differences between methods?
| richrichie wrote:
| Theoretically yes. In practice it is extremely difficult
| to say no to the short dopamine shots that a smart phone
| can deliver. Perhaps, comparable how alcoholics struggle
| to drink moderately.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| Because many people will read different content than in
| physical book form.
| safety1st wrote:
| I am actually surprised that this is not self-evident, I
| figured everyone knew it, but upon reflection I suppose
| not.
|
| So we have a bunch of data that points to these
| conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying
| to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key
| insights
|
| - We know that attention spans are just massively shorter
| on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this
| comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like
| pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the
| phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web
| for example you always see higher bounce rates and
| shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement
|
| - When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of
| research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer
| on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the
| gold standard is still reading from paper, and then
| handwriting notes about what you read
|
| - It follows from the various above points that you're
| going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts
| on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a
| paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see
| on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where
| it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Doing challenging intellectual activity on a phone is
| possible, but it's a very small portion of what people
| actually do when they pick up said phone.
|
| Phones are wonderful objects full of possibility, but in
| this context they're objects of mass distractions. That's
| 99.9% of their reality. Nothing wrong with normalising
| them as such.
|
| Cocaine might be wonderfully productive for certain
| people, but that's not how it should be broadly discussed
| when we talk about its usage.
| eastbound wrote:
| By do you ruminate negative thoughts? That's my excuse for
| keeping my phone playing at night: I'm single, and despite
| being a successful professional and trying hard at dating
| when I was younger, my private life is full of bad
| experiences. I think about it and get angry. Youtube masks
| it.
|
| Yes I've seen psychologists but no, really, they try to ou
| the blame on me but every time it's the others who bullied
| me. Anyway -- without a smartphone keeping your mind busy,
| how do you mask negative thoughts?
| exe34 wrote:
| embrace them, just refuse to act on them. let the
| thoughts come in, let them stay, and eventually they go
| back out. you're left with boredom, which can then be
| filled with whatever productive things that you enjoy.
| eastbound wrote:
| That's the thing with mental health, sometimes you forget
| one of the methods to get rid of unhealthy habits, and
| they might be so simple. Let's give it a try.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Sometimes have the same issue (rumination).
|
| I listen to podcasts and youtube science, tech ans
| history videos (with non exiting voices and without music
| or other sounds) to block out thoughts. It works. I guess
| audiobooks should work too.
|
| Mind you I keep thinking that I should try meditation to
| build up my capacity at directing my thoughts, but with
| everything going on I can't seem to find the time.
|
| Using my phone for anything else though (reading,
| watching videos) have the inverse effect and keep me
| awake.
| andai wrote:
| Meditation helped me a lot. You can train yourself to
| notice when your mind is doing something unpleasant or
| unproductive. When you notice that, it typically just
| stops, and you wonder why you were even doing it in the
| first place.
|
| I'd recommend (ironically) an app for that, but the
| important part is that you practice every day, even if
| only for a few minutes.
|
| Alternatively, being too busy and/or social to spend any
| time thinking -- I joked the other day that I had
| "backdoored" my way into enlightenment by simply having
| no time/energy to think.
|
| I didnt create that situation on purpose, both aspects
| are due to poverty (working two jobs and living in shared
| accomodations) but they've both had powerful unexpected
| benefits, to the point where I'm not much looking forward
| to getting my own place and going back to being alone all
| the time again.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that your past life experiences haunt
| you, but I'm also glad to hear that you've done well
| professionally for yourself despite that.
|
| I can't pretend to truly know your situation and realize
| you may have received similar advice already, but in case
| you haven't or someone else reads this who feels
| similarly, here is some anyway.
|
| Firstly, keep in mind this advice also applies inside the
| work place, for example think of having lost a client as
| someone who was largely responsible for preventing that
| from happening.
|
| When something bad happens, we can have one of two
| mindsets about it, a victim mindset or alternatively a
| mindset of "how can I improve myself from this
| experience?".
|
| The key thing to understand is that the victim mindset is
| disempowering, that you're resigning yourself to be
| helpless to stop it happening again, while the other
| mindset allows you to potentially be stronger and more
| capable for the future.
|
| So when something bad happens, it's necessary to reflect
| on what happened, and it's okay to acknowledge that the
| circumstances were largely beyond your control, but you
| must be sure to focus on what _you_ can change or control
| to try be in a better position for the future.
|
| And because the past can't be changed (although not
| easily forgotten either), what you can change is what you
| choose to do about it going forward.
|
| This change in mindset is often something that takes time
| to acquire, so don't expect it to just happen, but the
| important thing is to constantly reflect with the goal of
| continuously moving towards achieving it and one day you
| may find you have.
|
| I wish you the best of luck for the future.
| eastbound wrote:
| I have correct answers to all of your questions. How do I
| know they are correct? Well first of all science: They're
| repeatable and produce reliably the same result. Second:
| Attitude: People go all ways when I spell them out, deny
| them, be bad-faithed, attack me, or nag me on superficial
| properties; but one thing they don't do is provide an
| argument against it.
|
| It's maybe usual to see people victimizing themselves in
| that society and that they're so systematically wrong
| that "Take responsibility" is good advice.
|
| However, I'm a white male who dwelled into work and got
| good results, and literal hate does exist against me.
|
| Of course, some people who were talented early enough did
| succeed to build a balanced life. I didn't learned to
| date early enough, and when 25 years old came, girls went
| systematically batshit crazy when they saw that I didn't
| know how to handle sex, so that I reached 40 without a
| single positive experience.
|
| It's possible to recover with women when you get accepted
| in groups, but I'm a white male and I refuse to apologize
| for being white, because it's been harassment all my
| life, and yes people are cunts, so no I won't recover.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Eh, I'm a handholdless wizard who's been down in the
| dumps for years now, so trust me when I say I know what
| you're feeling (kind of). The trick is that yes, we need
| distraction from our shitty lives and it's very
| comfortable sinking into a zoomer routine to numb
| yourself BUT you can get the same level of distraction
| from saner occupations, as long as you still have some
| fire inside you (often in the form of spite and
| bitterness, which are much healthier than simple decay).
|
| Lift heavy objects and acquire mass, lose yourself in
| classic nerd crap (old school fantasy/SF novels, obscure
| music, do the Advent of Code in Lisp/ML/Forth/Prolog),
| solo hiking, drive fast, etc... embrace the loneliness
| and become someone better than the rabble, choose the
| path of the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", not that of
| the brainrotten goblin!
|
| I'm not saying that existential pain will cease,
| especially when being around people with a normal life
| full of joy that seems so unattainable, but it certainly
| makes you feel better in the long term.
| eastbound wrote:
| Thank you, it's true that hate and the idea of revenge
| kept me from committing suicide and were the path out
| from my darkest times. Maybe I've recovered more than I
| admit, because your vocabulary is what I used 3 years ago
| and I'm far from that now, just the addiction to Youtube
| remains, to covers the negative thoughts.
|
| There is still advice that I'll use from your comment,
| and once again I love the vocabulary "Lift heavy objects
| and acquire mass", which is typical from the meme world.
| You basically remind me of Jordan Peterson's advice to
| stand up and do something, as soon as a lighter period of
| depression strucks.
| shadowerm wrote:
| What worked for me is getting in really good physical
| shape and good physical conditioning.
|
| I can remember constantly thinking how much life sucked,
| no matter how good it actually was. Slowly, the negative
| thoughts just went away as my physical conditioning
| improved.
| safety1st wrote:
| It's possible that the discipline of psychology has
| something to offer you and you've simply seen a few bad
| psychologists. (There are plenty of them.)
|
| If you ruminate a lot I would look into cognitive
| behavioral therapy and its variants and think about how
| their principles can be incorporated into your
| ruminations. The TLDR of CBT is it involves analyzing
| your negative thoughts critically, rationally and
| systematically in writing. Often when we do that the
| thoughts lose their emotional hold on us, even if some of
| them are true.
|
| Avoiding may be better than ruminating, but processing is
| better than both. I spent way too much of my life
| thinking that ruminating was worthwhile on its own and
| eventually realized it is not unless you structure it
| narrowly and productively.
| cardanome wrote:
| The problem is that I can not pace myself.
|
| I can go cold turkey without any withdrawals. Not using no
| phone or computer on holidays? Not a problem. It would not
| be a great sacrifice for me to never touch a computing
| device ever again in my life.
|
| But that using the internet only at certain times thing?
| Absolutely not. There will always be an exception because I
| need to look up something really badly and once the
| exception is done it is over. Restricting certain sites?
| But then there is that search result or that person linked
| me something I need to see. Away with the filter!
|
| It sucks because as a software engineer I need to keep up
| with things so there isn't really a way to quit.
| andai wrote:
| I just had a text file "stuff to Google" and I Googled it
| later. There was always more work to do so I could either
| work around it or just do something else for a few hours
| and come back to it when I went back online.
|
| Though most of the stuff was just documentation, so I
| just downloaded offline docs and reduced the need to
| Google stuff by an order of magnitude.
|
| Of course, it's going to depend on what you're doing (I
| assume it works better for solo work) and what kind of
| resources are available.
| andai wrote:
| Yeah, in my case the benefits were dramatic because I'm
| easily distracted and lose track of time. So I was like,
| I'm just going to eliminate all possible distractions. I
| found that very helpful.
|
| Another effect was that I started to become somewhat more
| productive during times when I did have access to my phone,
| or rather, more reluctant to start wasting time even if the
| option was easily available to me.
| grecy wrote:
| We have our wifi router on an old school power timer. It
| turns off at 10pm and back on at 8am.
|
| It's a great signal I need to go to bed.
| slavik81 wrote:
| On the other hand, I locked my phone in a rental car and it
| took a week for them to mail it back to me. I was surprised,
| but I found that it made very little difference. I did not
| feel like I had any more time than usual.
|
| The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything
| that required two-factor authentication.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| losing 2fa gives me anxiety. google auth is sync'ing now.
| it's a terrible idea from a security standpoint, though,
| which gives me even more anxiety... i guess i can't avoid
| security-related anxieties
| sebmellen wrote:
| Use an open source TOTP manager and sync your codes using
| something like Standard Notes, not your regular password
| manager. This gives nice redundancy and two layers of
| security while staying synced.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Ente Auth + $100 old android phone for backing up to.
|
| Old phone stays in a safe, and only pull it out to add
| new TOTP codes.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| 1password fixes this
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I am with you on this, which I why I now use as many
| services I can that do not use it. Starting with my
| email.
| huijzer wrote:
| Get a few YubiKeys (or similar) and also link them. You
| only need one of the 2FA and can link multiple.
| als0 wrote:
| It's unfortunate that some sites only accept one Yubikey
| and not multiple.
| OJFord wrote:
| Even AWS. (Per IAM user.)
| wraptile wrote:
| n of 8 is essentially meaningless tho
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| It's not n of 8. The article doesn't mention cohort size
| (year 8 is what 7th grade is called in the UK)
|
| Found another source that said n was 26
| jweir wrote:
| Our eldest child has a phone. But it has to be kept downstairs
| at night - no tech in the bedroom before bed.
|
| Hasn't been a fight or a problem at all.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| How old are they and since what age do they have the phone?
| What constitutes as before bed and at what age do you think
| you'll lift the no tech restriction entirely?
| caseyy wrote:
| I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago, and I have 50% more
| motivation, 50% more headspace to focus on things, and 50% better
| moods most days. The attention economy, especially in social
| media, is a plague.
|
| It wasn't always this way. I did digital detoxes every few years
| for about two decades. For most of that time, there were always
| subtle positive impacts of switching off. But nowadays, the
| positive effects are not subtle _at all_. They are _very_
| significant.
|
| I am impressed we let a few companies commodify and commercialize
| human attention and human connection to this degree. Humanity has
| been done a great disservice in both areas by them. One day, this
| period of mass harm will be a chapter in history books, I am now
| convinced.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What did you replace it with (if you did edit: scratch that, I
| brain froze and was thinking of "did you replace it with a
| regular phone") ? Most accounts I read of people ditching their
| smartphones mentioned they started carrying an ultra light
| laptop or small candy bar computer (for instance). Basically
| increasing inconvenience to reduce usage.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you can accomplish a whole lot of the same keeping the phone
| and deleting all social media apps and accounts (what I did).
| I still use my phone as a map and camera and many other
| things ... my screentime went from 7+ hours to hardly ever
| over 40 minutes daily
| johnchristopher wrote:
| That's not the point. The focus here is on removing the
| smartphone out of the system, not removing features from
| the smartphone.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that is actually not the focus. phones in it of
| themselves are not actually a problem, what we do with
| them is. you get phone companies to provide under-16
| phones which have ability to call, text, use Map and
| limited browser capacity and not a single soul would
| complain about kids having phones on them. not a single
| soul might be a stretch as of course there'll always be
| someone but you get my point...
| johnchristopher wrote:
| That is actually the focus of _my_ question and comment:
|
| > > *I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago,*
|
| > *What did you replace it with* (if you did edit:
| scratch that, I brain froze and was thinking of "did you
| replace it with a regular phone") ? Most accounts I read
| of people ditching their smartphones mentioned they
| started carrying an ultra light laptop or small candy bar
| computer (for instance). Basically increasing
| inconvenience to reduce usage.
|
| Now if you could stop hijacking the thread and assuming I
| don't know smartphones can be tweaked that'd be cool.
| natsucks wrote:
| Turning GrayScale mode on also helps.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Woah I never heard this before. Very novel. Is the theory
| here the grey scale is less visually stimulating compared
| to full colour? LOL, it almost makes me wonder if we need
| a Duplo mode that makes everything crap 8-bit colours and
| low-res to scare people away from their phones.
| uncharted9 wrote:
| I keep coming back to the sites on my phone's browser. I
| have tried using various firewall applications to block
| network traffic. But it's hilariously easy to get around
| them.
| caseyy wrote:
| You can actually disable the browser in a pretty serious
| way in iOS. First, ask your spouse/friend/colleague to
| set up parental controls on your phone and have them hold
| onto the code. Second, remove Safari through Content &
| Privacy Restrictions. Third, set up Downtime in whitelist
| mode to run all day. This way, Safari is disabled and an
| alternative browser cannot be installed from the App
| Store. If you want full control of your phone back,
| you'll need to ask your spouse/friend/colleague for the
| code - totally doable but now it's pretty difficult to
| get around the restrictions.
|
| Something similar should exist for Android with regard to
| parental controls. Though for Android, I suppose you
| could also just uninstall/disable both the browser and
| the Play Store through adb.
| uncharted9 wrote:
| Parental controls on Android are a bit more complicated
| and require another Google account. I'll take the latter
| route. I'll just install something like Firefox Focus,
| which clears browsing data on exit. It will help for one-
| off searches or an app that launches the browser for some
| process. I'm not sure if disabling the Play Store is a
| good idea. It might cause problems with updates. Right?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| how do you deal with otp, mfa, mandatory id scans, face scans,
| compulsory apps, etc.?
| aniviacat wrote:
| Otp and other types of mfa can be done on PC, too.
|
| Mandatory apps (that I am aware of) should also be runnable
| on your PC using an Android emulation layer.
|
| Mandatory ID and face scans can be done via webcam.
|
| What I am more curious about is how they deal with navigation
| when traveling. A phone seems like a must-have whenever you
| are using public transport (e.g. a plane).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > A phone seems like a must-have whenever you are using
| public transport (e.g. a plane).
|
| It isn't. You can still print your boarding pass (at home
| in advance or at an airport kiosk). Flight status and gate
| assignments are posted on screens all over the airport.
| caseyy wrote:
| I have a phone I set up specifically to disallow content
| consumption. It has a permanently on Downtime mode (iOS) with
| only a handful of apps whitelisted - mainly the ones you
| mentioned. The notifications are disabled, too. I don't have
| the parental controls passcode, I asked someone else to set
| it and hold on to it; so it's a lot of effort to bypass the
| content blocks.
|
| I needed this to ween off social media, scrolling, mindless
| content consumption, otherwise it was just too convenient and
| easy to access all that to make the change.
|
| Generally, this phone isn't a problem with regard to social
| media use or browsing. So it gets used only as a tool, and
| left in a drawer most of the time. My main phone is a
| dumbphone but with this second phone, I've not lost access to
| banking, work apps, etc.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is slightly crazy, but also "extremely hard-core". I
| have real respect for your actions. That is some real self-
| control! You should write a blog post about it and/or do a
| YouTube documentary. Small joke: David Attenborough can
| narrate the video.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I really want to do this but there are so many things I need to
| do that now require a phone- key apps to access doors, concert
| tickets, etc. are no longer offering a non smartphone
| alternative.
| caseyy wrote:
| Well, I think it was mainly the social media, notifications,
| and content consumption - not so much the smartphone itself.
| Dumping the smartphone was simply a "cold turkey" solution.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I don't think a smartphone itself is the issue, but the apps
| that are on it.
|
| Keep the phone, ditch social media apps/sites.
| gerdesj wrote:
| My company is situated across a main road from a college. There
| are a couple of permissive rights of way across our land to the
| road and quite a few students walk that way and also up the road.
|
| This horror of a link is what Google Maps shows with Street View:
|
| https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9469423,-2.6380275,3a,75y,...
|
| Our place is the left hand turn off. The college is about 100m
| further up on the right. Pretend I'm in the red car. I often see
| kids with headphones on the pavement (sidewalk) cross our turn
| off without looking around - invariably they are wearing massive
| bins - head phones and listening to music or podcasts or
| whatever. Kids also walk down our ramp towards the college too.
| Again with minimal regard for traffic.
|
| That road is the A37 which I was told a while back conveys at
| least 30,000 odd vehicles per day.
|
| I often get to pause whilst waiting for a kiddie to cross. To be
| fair, our traffic laws now allow for pedestrians to have right of
| way when crossing a "turn off". However, that is a life limiting
| thing to depend upon without keeping an eye out!
|
| Never mind phones, why not keep an eye on the real world and stop
| pretending that wearing bins will stop a car killing you?
| aorloff wrote:
| I live far enough away from you that I think your English needs
| tuning up, and I couldn't agree more.
|
| In my college town the scooters around campus, ridden both on
| the roadway and on the sidewalk, add another element of risk to
| the "headphones are not helmets" crowd.
| WWLink wrote:
| I mean, ok? What's the big deal? So you have to drive slowly
| and carefully and wait for people who are walking and might not
| be paying the best of attention?
|
| I can see how that may be annoying but how many seconds/minutes
| does it add to your commute such that you would be so bothered
| about it?
|
| Edit: And to clarify, I believe your post is incredibly tame
| and politely written. I've seen people get super furious over
| the slightest inconvenience - both in person and on the
| internet. Like they feel 1000% entitled to drive 5+mph over the
| speed limit and any interruption in that results in them laying
| on the horn and yelling obscenities.
| mattlondon wrote:
| An A road is typically a high-speed high-throughput road.
| Stopping to wait for someone to slowly cross can be
| dangerous. So you are stationary there and then some comes
| around the bend at 60mph not expecting a stopped car and
| wham.
|
| Not saying cars should have priority, but there you go
| DamonHD wrote:
| Just _maybe_ no one should be regarding coming round a
| blind corner at 60mph as any more sensible than crossing
| the road without looking ... especially given that the
| motorist is a lethal danger to others...
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| He has to drive slowly, because he knows the road layout, the
| other drivers though... i think that was OP's point
| duxup wrote:
| My kid's school got a lot of press for a smartphone ban. To be
| clear you could still have a phone, it was just taken if anyone
| saw it during school hours. If you got caught 3 times your
| parents had to come retrieve it ... that last part did wonders.
|
| I don't know how the sleep part plays into it, my oldest of
| course wants his phone with him at all times (he is required to
| put it away before bedtime).
|
| I wonder if the school's ban encouraged parents to set similar
| restrictions?
| jonhohle wrote:
| Our school has similar restriction, but then shoved Chromebooks
| in front of every kid and they use chat instead of text, watch
| videos, and play games all through class instead. When I've
| tried to find alternatives for my more distractible kids, the
| school acts like we're putting them out.
|
| What is the point of a cell phone ban when it's just replaced
| with a more capable device?
| dylan604 wrote:
| If a school doesn't have an IT policy of blocking YouTube and
| socials, then they are just inept. If the school is buying
| instructional material that requires that, then they are
| inept. If an instructional company is making anything
| requiring any of that, they are inept.
| rob_c wrote:
| Yeah but most IT graduates working in a UK school on that
| salary are beyond inept in all honesty which is why do y
| many kids are able to find ways around the tills they
| use...
| sahmeepee wrote:
| That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment.
|
| I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot
| is very far from my lived experience. If you want to
| educate yourself in what the large community of typically
| very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect
| children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a
| look through their "filtering" related forum.
|
| Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools
| were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we
| maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and
| mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it
| wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones
| every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new
| ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the
| kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that
| scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash
| games embedded within them via an activex component and
| nuke them.
|
| This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an
| incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software
| often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated
| from on high. I now work in an organisation with >PS1bn
| turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software
| packages than just one secondary school I used to work
| for.
|
| What you realise over time is that the technical tools
| are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to
| use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need
| to use their existing disciplinary protocols when
| children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to
| provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no
| child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.
| jonhohle wrote:
| You know how you get it right? Either on prem, offline
| everything, or explicit allow lists controlled by
| teachers for that specific period. Disable USB ports.
|
| That's what we moved to for one of our kids who couldn't
| handle it. Except we have to control the access because
| the school won't. It works.
|
| Is it perfect? No. Google Docs is the worst due to
| embedding. But it beats whack-a-mole.
|
| I've now had to do the management job of six teachers
| because they apparently don't have the skill to deal with
| 30 kids with Swiss cheese restrictions. This, despite
| significant investments in software.
| jonhohle wrote:
| If they'd train on my child's search and browser history,
| they'd probably close most holes within minutes of them
| being known. smh
| arrowsmith wrote:
| If my child's school had them playing games on Chromebooks
| all class, I would move them to a different school.
| rob_c wrote:
| In Scotland it's iPads paid for by London so move them
| there at least :p
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This was the policy at my school ~20 years ago. "Smartphones"
| didn't exist, but mobile phones were ubiquitous and every kid
| owned one. But they weren't allowed in the classroom, and if
| you were found to have one in the classroom (even if it was
| switched off in your pocket), it would immediately be
| confiscated and you wouldn't get it back until at least the
| next day.
|
| Why would any school _not_ have this policy? What possible
| reason is there to allow phones in the classroom? How is this
| even a debate?
| graemep wrote:
| Confiscation until the next day could cause all sorts of
| problems. For example my daughter needs a smartphone app for
| bus tickets. It would be a lot more expensive to buy a single
| ticket to get home and I suppose (especially with younger
| kids) its going to be difficult to ensure they have the money
| to get home - or the phone might be their main means of
| payment.
|
| People are dependent on smartphones to live day to day, in a
| way that they were not on simple mobile phones.
| walthamstow wrote:
| > Confiscation until the next day could cause all sorts of
| problems.
|
| Don't use your phone in class and it won't get confiscated.
| What's the problem?
| rob_c wrote:
| I'm sorry but my honest response to that is something is
| failing there, either education or parent but you're both
| using the child as an excuse.
|
| Having to walk home or wait to get picked up from school to
| be punished isn't crazy its called consequences which
| children need to be taught.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| There's an easy solution to this problem: don't get your
| phone confiscated.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I don't know of any public transit that has a mobile app as
| the _only_ way to prove purchase of some pass, they all
| have a physical card you can obtain. Maybe yours doesn't,
| but I doubt it.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I bought something called brick which lets me lock some apps with
| a Bluetooth app. I have to walk to a different room and touch my
| phone to the little cube magneted to my fridge in order to unlock
| them. Just this extra friction has halved my screen time. No
| phone in bed no phone while I'm working and no phone on weekends
| while I'm bored.
|
| Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Link?
| mmiyer wrote:
| https://getbrick.app/
| smusamashah wrote:
| Took clicking shop now button to realise it's iPhone only.
| hawaiianbrah wrote:
| Been seeing ads for a while, finally caved two weeks ago and
| bought one. I've been on vacation since it arrived but I'm
| honestly quite excited to get home tonight and set it up.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I've also been receiving ads for this and I gotten tell ya...
| Getting a testimonial from a HN'er on a random thread is a huge
| vote of confidence. I've been toying around with the idea of
| getting one.
| ajoseps wrote:
| I've also been using this and I think it's a great product.
| It's exactly as you describe it, just some extra friction makes
| a huge difference. I've even bought some for friends
| babyoil wrote:
| All the replies under this comment sound like shameless
| advertising
| Taek wrote:
| I feel like we're getting closer to the moment where all high
| quality discussion will be locked behind invite only forums.
| (anyone can read, need an invite to write)
|
| I can't really think of any other solution to the prevalence
| of bots as it gets easier and cheaper to write human seeming
| content
| guerrilla wrote:
| What's going to stop advertisers and propagandists from
| paying off those forum gatekeepers? Unless they're already
| wealthy or monks, they're going to be trivial to corrupt
| and the content will be even more effective!
| lanternfish wrote:
| you pay them in the only resource known to humanity to be
| worth more than money - petty forum power predicated on
| exclusivity.
| wyre wrote:
| What keeps you from just leaving your phone unlocked? Does the
| unlock expire after a certain amount of time?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Nothing but the desire to sleep well
| jorisboris wrote:
| My best ideas come in my bed
|
| Ideally I have a kale phone to note them
|
| Because it's too easy to go to social after I noted down my
| idea
| guerrilla wrote:
| You do know paper exists, right? ;)
| 8note wrote:
| its hard to write in the dark
| arrowsmith wrote:
| You do know bedside lamps exist, right?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, I've rarely seen a bedroom without them. Candles or
| a flashlight would work great too. This is a long solved
| problem.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Lightbulb after lightbulb going off in this thread :)
|
| As the person who posted about the option to lock
| selected apps - notes and voice recorder can be easily
| excluded from that set.
| RowanH wrote:
| Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control
| notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the
| APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...)
| let's a 3rd party app do that..
|
| Neat idea
| DrawTR wrote:
| For what it's worth, the product demands $50 for what is
| essentially a < $1.00 3D printed case and a < $1.00 NFC tag.
| You could _probably_ (not endorsing it!) find the NFC code
| online and just dump it to a tag of your own.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| I would go limb and suggest that, maybe, developing the app
| is the expensive part.
| gretch wrote:
| If you know how to do all of this, you probably make more
| than $100 per hour at your day job (maybe a lot more!).
|
| In which case you can jump through all those hoops, or you
| can just go to work for 30 minutes and then buy it.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I think you're way off - I don't know people making that
| much, but I do know several people who are well capable of
| that, and have literally embedded NFC tags with their own
| data in 3D printed things they've made. They're making
| <$100K (pre-tax)
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I bought it because it did not require a subscription and
| because it sounded like a smallish business - told me I had
| to wait a few days for it to be 3D printed.
|
| I love the simplicity of it, the fact that it's driven by
| fulfilling a need and not by greed.
|
| Not affiliated in any way. Wish I had given this to myself
| years ago.
|
| Also wish I had come up with the idea myself.
| iammrpayments wrote:
| There are so many confounding variables here, the study doesn't
| have a control group.
|
| The study was made with kids from the same grade who "were
| convinced" to give up their phones, so basically it could be the
| study hypothesis is right but there's a high change it could be
| anything else.
| protocolture wrote:
| If the goal of schooling is to improve sleep and mood, they
| should also include giving up school entirely for 21 days as a
| control.
| blitzar wrote:
| They try it every year in the summer. It has significant
| negative effects on all the parents involved.
| graemep wrote:
| I know that is a joke, but it has enough truth in it to be a
| sad comment on a society in which parents do not enjoy time
| with their kids.
| Tade0 wrote:
| They do, but to an extent. Kids are kids and want to do kid
| stuff, especially when the alternative is dull, but
| necessary work like chores.
|
| My daughter likes to help and we as parents encourage her
| to, but for us it just means more work.
| EternalFury wrote:
| My kids are phone drones. I failed to prevent it. I'll never
| forgive myself.
| warner25 wrote:
| That's heavy. If you're willing to share, I'm curious to hear
| more. Like when did you have kids, when did they get their
| hands on phones, how did it progress?
|
| My own kids are still too young for this to be an issue, and
| I'm encouraged to see more and more collective action to delay
| or restrict smartphones and social media, so I feel like we
| have a chance. I've said before that people who had kids 5-10
| years before me (say, 2005-2010) seem to have suffered the
| worst of it, totally caught off guard by the smartphone and
| social media boom.
| EternalFury wrote:
| Your estimate is dead on. My first was born in 2005 and my
| second in 2009. Social media and the early sexualization it
| brought were a problem for sure. But pretty much every
| interaction with these devices is messing with dopamine
| regulation.
| warner25 wrote:
| Interesting. Thinking more now about why I picked 2005, I'm
| trying to decide if someone with a kid born in 2000 fared
| any better. I suppose that those kids were already
| teenagers when smartphones reached 50% market penetration,
| and giving smartphones to kids became normalized, and the
| "pivot to video" happened (really turning "social networks"
| into "social media" in my mind). I'm not sure if that was
| better or worse for them.
| blitzar wrote:
| You have two options; a) pivot to a new product or b) just
| ditch them and start over fresh.
| walthamstow wrote:
| It's fixable, it's not a lost cause. Question is, are you and
| partner phone drones yourselves?
| EternalFury wrote:
| Not at all at first. More and more since the pandemic.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Again, it's a study that went all the way to monitor kids for 3
| weeks, with sleep tracking, the school also helping etc. Minors
| are involved, so It must have been planned, ethically checked,
| reviewed and adjusted by experts.
|
| And yet no control group. No report on what happened after the 3
| weeks ( it should all go back to the similar levels once the ban
| is lifted, right ? Did it ?)
|
| Not all studies can be perfect, but it feels almost intentional
| to go these lengths and omit such critical parts. Was this just
| some checkbox checking study to back a pre decided policy ?
| card_zero wrote:
| There was a control group, according to the site of Stanway
| school. However the whole thing is very much a TV show,
| featuring a Big Brother presenter, the bassist from Busted, and
| a TV doctor who hopes it "kick-starts a national conversation
| about which aspects of technology use can HELP our children and
| which aspects are in fact HARMING them." No preconceived ideas
| there at all, right? But I can't find a paper, with details of
| the experiment, such as how participants were selected and how
| they were motivated.
|
| https://stanway.essex.sch.uk/swiped-the-people/
|
| The thought occurs that the participants were being _goodie-
| goodies,_ pandering to adult concerns, and saying the right
| things such as "yes I feel much less anxious, also I want to
| pick litter, save some endangered snails, eat vegetables and be
| virtuous in every way because all the things adults say are so
| right, look how responsible I am, praise me".
|
| I guess a better test might be an involuntary one, like a solar
| storm that knocks the phone network out.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I couldn't find any mention of it, either on the Stanway site
| nor the York University which was the posted article.
|
| Also the page on your link feels incredibly short, is there
| something that's not properly loading for me ? (at the same
| time I have a "2 minutes" reading time estimate on the
| header, so it can't be that long ?)
|
| That's all I get:
|
| > SWIPED: The School That Banned Smartphones is a landmark
| two-part documentary series, produced by BOLDPRINT Studios,
| which tackles the timely issue of the impact of smartphones
| on children's behaviour.
|
| Through a groundbreaking social experiment that challenges a
| group of teenagers to give up their smartphones for 21 days,
| SWIPED is exploring the impact of technology on mental
| health, social skills, and academic performance.
|
| In a world increasingly dominated by screens, SWIPED dives
| into the heart of a bold experiment at The Stanway School.
| Led by celebrity couple Matt and Emma Willis, a group of Year
| 8 students are forced to confront the reality of life without
| their constant companions: smartphones.
|
| For three weeks, these young participants willingly
| surrendered their devices, stepping into a digital detox. As
| they navigated this unfamiliar territory, cameras captured
| their evolving experiences, revealing surprising insights
| into the profound influence of technology on their lives.
|
| Guided by experts from the University of York, the
| documentary delves into the science behind smartphone
| addiction, examining how these devices impact sleep patterns,
| attention spans, and social interactions. Through a series of
| tests and challenges, the students' mental and emotional
| states are meticulously monitored, shedding light on the
| potential benefits of a technology-free existence. SWIPED is
| more than just a documentary; it's an invitation to rethink
| our relationship with technology and prioritise our mental,
| emotional, and social well-being.
| card_zero wrote:
| > Interestingly, the research didn't show significant
| improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a
| modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements
| in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results
| might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer
| than the study period of 21 days to materialise.
|
| Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to
| find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of
| it.
| techNoob123 wrote:
| yes they had a hypothesis. that's how science works.
|
| You left out the other benefits the study found. those benefits
| seem to be quite significant. In fact, I will go as far as to
| say that sleep has been well associated with student
| performance.
|
| You remark comes off as disingenuous and not ready for serious
| review.
| j45 wrote:
| Cognitive ability may have been growing as it does.. just been
| allocated elsewhere (scrolling).
|
| Sleep is the real superpower.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Commonly known as the scientific method.
| card_zero wrote:
| In what way?
| it_citizen wrote:
| Hypothesize then experiment
| card_zero wrote:
| Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you
| say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the
| conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a
| negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a
| determined effort to find specific results.
| eimrine wrote:
| > You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say
| "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the
| conjecture must be wrong."
|
| The time is also the part of the conjecture.
| 8note wrote:
| thats also a part of the scientific method.
|
| you dont believe the results you get, so you keep
| designing an collecting data from more experiments until
| you cant deny it anymore
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment
| might have been the wrong one, and that next time they
| have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer
| time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result
| that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within
| 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture
| that such changes might happen later, which would require
| a different kind of test?
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| They didn't say "reality must be wrong". They said that
| their initial hypothesis (that significant changes would
| be observed after 21 days) is probably wrong, so they
| implicitly proposed a second hypothesis (that significant
| changes occur after e.g. a few months).
|
| None of this is remotely contemptible.
|
| Pretend you're an immortal alien conducting a study with
| the hypothesis, "humans are mortal". You observe that
| your subjects do not die after 21 days. Do you conclude
| that humans are immortal? (I hope not. It's much better
| to conclude that humans don't usually die after 21 days
| in this particular instance of extraterrestrial
| captivity.)
| card_zero wrote:
| OK, fine, they didn't _literally_ say "reality must be
| wrong", they just thought it, probably. The attitude
| stinks. And I say it _is_ remotely contemptible. Perhaps
| I 'd go as far as to say moderately contemptible.
|
| It's a fair point about the aliens. They are presumably
| mortal themselves, they have expectations about lifespan.
| Something about the mind not being a blank slate, it's
| hypotheses all the way down, can't escape preconceived
| ideas. Sure. Except you can _try._ You can be _more_
| impartial than you otherwise might be, when you 're aware
| that there's something to be partial about.
|
| In the case of smartphone bans, the viewpoint is almost
| _politicized,_ like whether you 're down with the tech
| bros or think they're evil. Researchers should know that,
| and thus should be very coldly objective. Here they
| expect the degradation of mental function, why? That's
| not something well-understood like mortality. It's
| probably something there's a great wobbly mass of very
| questionable psychological research about - low attention
| in school and degraded working memory due to what they
| may well call "screentime" - and they've just gone along
| with it like it's established. _Why is known evil thing
| not acting sufficiently evil to meet our narrative? Must
| do more research until true._
|
| Another sketchy part of doing this research is the
| subtext that _smartphones lower the mood_ entails
| _therefore ban smartphones in schools._ That isn 't a
| science-based decision, it's a decision to trample on the
| kids' rights for their own good: science can't guide
| moral choices. But the only reason to scientifically
| establish the first part, the fact, is for the purpose of
| advocating a ban.
| drawkward wrote:
| If you think children have a right to smartphones in
| school, then your priors are just really out of line with
| anyone who is actually concerned with the well being of
| children.
| drawkward wrote:
| Science denialism will send us back to tbe dark ages.
| card_zero wrote:
| You'd better not do any, then. Were you thinking of it?
| n8henrie wrote:
| Not at all. Type II error is routinely the result of
| methodological flaws like insufficient sample size.
|
| It would be asinine to study the effects of parachutes on
| survivability of jumping from airplanes, hypothesizing
| that they would help, but conclude that the "conjecture
| must be wrong" because the sample size was 2 and it
| failed to reach statistical significance, or because the
| airplane was on the ground.
|
| Would you feel differently if the study period was only 1
| day instead of 25?
|
| Or maybe 1 hour?
|
| Would it then be reasonable for them to speculate that
| the methodology might contribute to the failure to reject
| the null hypothesis?
| n8henrie wrote:
| Typo: 21
| drawkward wrote:
| Just because you allege
|
| >it's a determined effort to find specific results
|
| does not make it so.
| 0xRusty wrote:
| You start with a hypothesis and then you test it.
| card_zero wrote:
| And then you find it was wrong, and you keep it, and make
| protestations.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| I've seen the same thing in many A/B tests
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| they found it was invalid in the short term, for this
| particular study. the long term is still an open
| question. which is why they're pointing that out.
|
| saying "we thought this would happen, it didn't, but
| maybe there's just something to do with our study that
| meant we disnt see the result that confirms our
| hypothesis" is a perfectly valid conclusion.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| I'd humbly suggest "protestation" isn't the right word
| here
| jader201 wrote:
| I'm not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very
| surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this
| quickly.
|
| I've always felt that we wouldn't recover from the negative
| impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several
| years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and
| the short bursts of 10-second videos.
|
| I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that
| we could have some solid evidence -- and proper warnings
| against -- the negative impacts of phone addiction.
|
| Until then, kids -- and their parents -- are left with the
| unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social
| ostracism.
| Liquix wrote:
| > left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition,
| and social ostracism.
|
| This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people
| getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to
| live a full life. It's never been more important to
| aggressively curtail phone use - and make unpopular decisions
| that your kids will thank you for later - than it is now.
| jader201 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you have kids, but I'm not sure making the
| choice to ostracize your kids is one they'd thank you for
| later.
|
| And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on
| the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
| acron0 wrote:
| This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not
| ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being
| ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they
| risk being ostracised.
| jader201 wrote:
| 100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being
| done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could
| actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc.
|
| It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to
| cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were
| for you.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or
| even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more
| fulfillment than a million digital friends.
|
| And when living in an appropriate place to raise children
| (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet
| other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather
| large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.
|
| Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for
| your children.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > And when living in an appropriate place to raise
| children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy
| to meet other parents.
|
| Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a
| certain amount of money to enjoy.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish
| areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and
| once again something you'd be more inclined to find well
| outside the city.
| sahmeepee wrote:
| I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This
| isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital
| friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who
| almost all have smartphones losing a channel of
| communication with their schoolmates and thus being
| excluded from much of what goes on in the social group
| outside of school.
|
| I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the
| issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more
| about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning
| the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we
| impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put
| effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.
|
| There are a small number of kids in the year group with
| "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down
| on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might
| feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get
| older and more independent their needs for communication
| tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Yes, the two kids in grade school who's parents wouldn't
| let them watch SpongeBob felt some exclusions from the
| lunch table discussion as well. The social aspect is
| extremely difficult to solve, and the app makers know
| this and accentuate it. They are shrewd businesspeople
| who's only goal is a functioning app that brings in more
| money than last year, hopefully on an exponential curve.
| This social exclusion aspect is why Facebook is still
| there, plodding along. They've effectively trapped the
| last groups of people there, and they raise the wall
| faster than the stragglers can climb. I'm currently
| trapped in snapchat as the only way to stay in touch with
| my old dnd group for when i come around. But those people
| are actually my best friends, so i speak to them more
| often, and i will be decompiling the APK and gutting the
| engagement shit with a rusty saw the moment i have time.
|
| It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| By good I mean having a small number of good friends
| rather than superficial relationships with large numbers
| of people. That should be a false dichotomy of course,
| but in reality it seems to often hold.
|
| In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small
| group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same
| neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with
| addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those
| bonds are broken when you have to quit.
|
| The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is
| harder to quit.
|
| So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an
| important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I
| am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact
| with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty,
| shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by
| the phone use as well.
|
| It is a very complex issue to solve.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> I'm not a scientist in this field, but I would have been
| very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability
| this quickly._
|
| Not sure.
|
| I worked with a science team that had found very strong
| cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after
| improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were
| mostly middle aged and elderly.
| jader201 wrote:
| I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very
| different, even if somewhat connected.
|
| I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would
| definitely improve cognitive function.
|
| But removing phones would only help if it's degrading
| sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the
| parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not
| expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not
| quickly, anyway.
|
| Either way, these two need to be studied independently to
| know for sure.
| sahmeepee wrote:
| I agree that this study didn't separate the two very
| well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.
|
| They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier
| without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it
| an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents
| valued their kids' sleep, why was the _average_ bed time
| of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame
| that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I
| suppose, but it 's clearly not the whole story.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence
| bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put
| off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do
| refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected
| that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired.
|
| Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been
| watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an
| addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some
| kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X
| rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video
| games).
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Have you watched the infinite scroll much? Because my
| direct experience says you're wrong. Probably you can't
| really recreated the teenage phone experience even if you
| wanted to. What you need is:
|
| 1) a large enough group of actual close friends to use
| some social media app, so that by deleting that app you
| are removing a large part of your social life
|
| 2) those apps to continuously add infinite scroll, ad
| driven, engagement trap shit into every single aspect of
| the entire app.
|
| Imagine if your work messages came through tiktok and by
| pressing back you were instantly dropped into an infinite
| scroll feed curated to your interests. Or say, slack gets
| bought and becomes an ad driven company who's only metric
| is increased time in app. But! Then your work refuses to
| change apps! So as you watch the app slowly become an
| attention pit, you are completely prevented from escaping
| it.
|
| I don't think a lot of you old fogies really understand
| what the apps are like these days, or what teenage social
| life is like without the apps.
|
| The fact that you're claiming that it's not harder to
| read an uninteresting paragraph after watching an
| infinite feed tells me you, luckily, have the privilege
| of not being tethered to these apps. You have the
| privilege to exist in a world where your social life
| isn't governed by ad revenue.
|
| Because i grew up at the very start of all this, and some
| of my friends still use some of the apps, and everything
| that's "common knowledge" about phones and attention
| spans is true. The phone itself is fine, but i do think
| that the infinite scroll is just about the most dangerous
| device on the planet, barring the obvious ones.
|
| This just reads like a thread about preventing teenagers
| from starting smoking, being filled with older people
| saying "why would you do that? Quitting smoking isn't
| hard, i smoked a pack once and was fine. And besides,
| smoking a cigarette or two doesn't hurt anyone, I'm
| fine".
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes I watch a lot of YouTube shorts. It's addictive and a
| waste of time but I don't find it affects my cognitive
| ability at all.
|
| In fact it's mostly the other way around. I watch them
| when I'm too exhausted to do something productive (which
| is often unfortunately).
| llm_trw wrote:
| You should read what Socrates has to say about book addicts.
|
| We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how
| pernicious the written word is.
| Jakob wrote:
| Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through
| interaction. He compares the written word to a painting,
| meaning it can be analysed but it doesn't respond to
| questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.
|
| This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to
| passively watch "paintings" instead of interacting. The
| viewer's knowledge and critical thinking is improving only
| seemingly at best.
| lilbonaparte wrote:
| Do you have a link to this. I'm interested in reading
| more?
| 0xEF wrote:
| Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the
| product, so I guess this is not a new problem.
|
| I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice
| within us that recognizes when too much exposure or
| connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a
| way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember
| the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet
| in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that
| now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age
| remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the
| previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv
| (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my
| generation, in retrospect).
|
| On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in
| schools because mine did just fine without them. On the
| other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of
| good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are
| enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting
| them up to ask better questions when engaged in the
| Socratic dialogue.
|
| But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the
| real question we should be asking.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But
| i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high
| schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just
| addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from
| only ever interacting in the real world with people to
| sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with
| integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a
| different kind of thing by not just dampening real world
| interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention
| span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on
| any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't
| obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of
| every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is
| to start work).
|
| We all know that attention span is _required_ to get
| anything done academically, so directly correlated to
| intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done
| at all. We all know that children are building their
| brains, and that significant experiences in childhood
| impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood.
| Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a
| single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the
| world?
|
| I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple
| and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a
| bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many
| schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_
| interact with our children academically and know that the
| grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college
| level task because they can't stop looking at their phones,
| something which is easy to observe many children are
| _physically incapable of doing_.
|
| Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly
| motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i
| can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i
| (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to
| have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away
| from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app
| seems to insert into more and more places. About using
| reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google
| won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed.
| I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of
| society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you,
| i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a
| microsecond.
|
| What you're advocating for is a future where average
| attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want
| that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be
| fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What
| experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself
| and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic?
| Genuinely asking
| bluGill wrote:
| My kids are addicted to reading and I don't like it.
| Reading is great but not at the expense of staying up
| until 3am on a school night, not helping with basic
| household chores, not practicing music, not doing
| homework.
| warner25 wrote:
| I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never
| envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to
| "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good
| problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate
| times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure,
| absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not
| hearing any directions given.
| quesera wrote:
| I think all of those downsides may be frustrating in the
| moment, but will turn out to be much less important, when
| viewed in the longer term.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic
| results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in
| the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree
| with it and then thought of excuses as to why.
|
| > _Until then, kids -- and their parents -- are left with the
| unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social
| ostracism._
|
| Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?
| maccard wrote:
| > I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference
| in cognitive ability this quickly
|
| Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is
| one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to
| drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty
| much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.
|
| It's not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I
| suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and
| cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during
| those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change
| in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get
| more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw
| improvements.
|
| [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1]
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/
| Tenoke wrote:
| Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is
| pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to
| sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and
| it's just some brief effect with no reason to think
| otherwise from looking at this.
| nverno wrote:
| Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of
| staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to
| being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and
| reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition
| (although not in nearly as fun a way).
|
| The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is
| struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a
| person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also
| start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of
| hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying
| slightly when I focus on them.
|
| It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to
| retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
| djtango wrote:
| I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too
| much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to
| fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to
| compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for
| about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all
| been downhill again
| jrtageh wrote:
| I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When
| I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper,
| my math abilities rise sharply.
| carlmr wrote:
| Apart from whether the days are enough or not to wean off a
| long-standing addiction. Maybe a 3% boost in working memory has
| compounding effects over time as well.
|
| You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in
| working memory long enough. You can't think about complex
| things if you don't have the working memory capacity.
|
| If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate
| more knowledge after a while.
|
| Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious
| memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >If you always have 3% more working memory you might
| accumulate more knowledge after a while.
|
| Or you might accumulate way less knowledge because you don't
| have a phone to get information from and are getting say 300%
| less information overall despite retaining 3% more of what
| you get.
| wffurr wrote:
| Yeah kids are not generally using their phones during or
| between classes to take in even more knowledge on their
| class subjects...
| Tenoke wrote:
| Maybe not on or only on their class subjects, but kids
| also read random things including Wikipedia articles on
| topics they get curious about.
| riedel wrote:
| This typically good science. You have hypothesis and test it,
| rather than doing an intervention and reporting every random
| thing that happened.
|
| Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems
| a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the
| other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on
| cognitive development in the long run.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes but their conclusion is "well our hypothesis is probably
| still right, we just didn't look hard enough" rather than
| "maybe it doesn't have a significant effect".
| TOMDM wrote:
| Well yes, that's just decent Bayesian rigor.
|
| Previous studies have set a prior of x% confidence, you see
| evidence to the contrary, you update to some x-y%.
|
| Given the volume of research on sleep, it probably takes
| more evidence, even if it's your own study to throw that
| out.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Are there previous studies that have shown smartphone use
| impairs cognitive ability?
| II2II wrote:
| You can look at that statement in a couple of different
| ways. Yes, experimental bias is one of them. The other is
| saying: we didn't see this effect, so we need to do longer
| term studies to see if it does exist.
|
| Regardless, that statement is a good thing. It acknowledges
| a social bias towards the effect of smartphones. It doesn't
| give room for people to imply a result based upon that
| bias. On the surface, at least, it doesn't indicate that
| data was fudged to reach a particular result.
| n8henrie wrote:
| "Might mean" is a far cry from "our hypothesis is probably
| still right." This type of speculation is commonplace --
| even expected -- in the discussion section of an article.
| Not much different than the lame duck "further research is
| needed to..."
| hgomersall wrote:
| Why should the null hypothesis be preferred?
| flexie wrote:
| By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during
| school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no
| idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and
| frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They
| are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then
| they will learn what they need.
|
| As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7
| hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Someone realized it's not a good idea to hand a bunch of
| teens cameras, give them unlimited possibility to bully
| eachother anonymously and then force them to share a space
| for 8 hours every day, including changing clothes and
| showering for gym class. In hindsight it seems obvious.
| mattbee wrote:
| I think that's the norm in UK secondaries too. My 11yo is
| allowed to take his phone to school for but policy is it
| stays switched off, in the locker, until the end of the
| school day.
| kwakubiney wrote:
| So essentially almost every form of research?
| lugu wrote:
| What is wrong with that? Isn't it how science works: you make
| an hypothesis and test it.
| Xelbair wrote:
| but you conform to the experimental results.
|
| you can suggest further experimentation to prove another
| point, but this is different from assuming a priori that
| effect WILL happen. The issue is not in the idea itself, but
| how it is phrased.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| They did suggest a new experiment, one lasting longer than
| 21 days to test their hypothesis.
|
| Hypothesis -> proposed experiment -> results -> questions
| evoked by results -> new hypothesis -> new proposed
| experiment
|
| MOST importantly, they didn't fake any results and went
| where the data took them. This is the kind of science that
| has been falling out of fashion for the last few decades in
| favor of researchers who work based on _other_ principles.
| subroutine wrote:
| They could have included the obvious (but probably
| unwanted) alternative hypothesis:
|
| Researchers suggest that these results might mean that
| changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the
| study period of 21 days to materialize, _or access to
| devices has a positive effect on attention offsetting the
| effects of sleep on attention_.
|
| It's probably unlikely but it is an obvious possibility.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| So is the possibility that attention is an emergent
| genetic trait. There are many, many alternative
| explanations. You are lamenting the exclusion of your
| preferred alternative explanation, but the researchers
| need to choose one and look further along that branch.
|
| The idea of open science is that other teams would be
| free to explore plausible alternative hypotheses. Some
| team might explore yours. Another might dig into my idea
| about the behavior's relationship to genetics. And so on.
|
| This is the method by which we move ourselves forward.
| And it's easy to see how that effort is hampered by the
| practice of data tampering and other shenanigans. Which
| this team did not engage in, even when part of there
| hypothesis wasn't supported by their data.
|
| This team deserves a "Bravo!"
| sourcepluck wrote:
| OR - crazy hypothesis - maybe they're familiar with the
| large amounts of research that already exists which shows
| that access to devices has a negative effect on
| attention. Just maybe.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I think so many people, even most here on HN, have forgotten
| how the scientific method works.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Agree. I propose hypothesis here all the time and people
| will say "Show me the study that proves what you are
| saying!".
|
| For instance. It maybe that the distracting quality of the
| phone is not the only thing providing better sleep and
| mood, but maybe it is the collective power of the EMF
| radiation that is disturbing the children's catecholamines.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1382
| 6...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Ok. Design the experiment to test your hypothesis, and
| then present its results. The truth of it will be in the
| data.
|
| There is likely a way to test this hypothesis on human
| children in an ethical fashion.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I already designed the experiment. I cannot get funding.
|
| Also:
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2014/198609
|
| "They examined the acute as well as chronic effects of
| EMF exposure and found a significant increase in
| adrenaline and noradrenaline levels after EMF exposure,
| following a drop, but the normal levels were not restored
| even at the end of the study (about one and a half year).
| They also observed significant diminution in dopamine
| levels."
| Ray20 wrote:
| Or even banning phones makes schools (where the
| experiment is probably being conducted) less transparent,
| allowing more freely to pressure subjects (intentionally
| or not) to ensure the "proper" result of the experiment.
| jpace121 wrote:
| That's a very uncharitable interpretation of what they wrote,
| and goes outside of how what they wrote is supposed to be
| interpreted.
|
| The researchers are not claiming that cognitive ability changes
| would definitely take longer than 21 days to appear, they're
| suggesting that that is the next thing to test.
| drawkward wrote:
| >Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to
| find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of
| it.
|
| You are alleging this without evidence, and have no credibility
| to base your claims on.
| exabrial wrote:
| More importantly, I would wager: significantly less bullying,
| significantly less "have nots" for the kids that don't have the
| iPhone 42 HD MAX pro edition in solid gold, etc
| jldugger wrote:
| Okay, do late school start next!
| scott_w wrote:
| Tangentially related, I recall being a teenager playing video
| games until 3am in my bedroom. As I grew up and got my own place,
| I eventually decided to have no TV in my bedroom and my sleep
| improved a huge amount ever since. I'm not perfect, I'll
| sometimes go into a negative spiral playing chess until late and
| get more worked up, but once every few weeks/months is a marked
| improvement on every night!
|
| Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.
| s777 wrote:
| There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting
| and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college
| student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop
| is something that is constantly getting in the way of my
| productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like
| making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day
| in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an
| aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.
|
| During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures
| (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned
| next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes
| I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading
| the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and
| utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight
| A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently
| I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were
| wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or
| do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance
| at all (and probably improved it).
|
| Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a
| lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in
| real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family
| connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation,
| and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest
| concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is
| depriving them of this sort of information and community).
| Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of
| skills and make people instead learn things much more
| inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e.
| studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but
| not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most
| important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple
| times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in
| college).
|
| With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the
| school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a
| waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to
| fix everyone's problems.
| dainiusse wrote:
| Let's be honest. Its not only the kids. It is everyone...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The interpretation of these studies is a bit confused to me. Most
| of the proposed detriments are entirely plausible, but that is
| about as instructive as finding out that air pollution is bad for
| you during the industrial revolution.
|
| What are the effects on the opportunities of a child today, with
| restricted access to tech for 18 years in a highly developed
| country? What are the effects on a country with wide spread
| restrictions? To the best of my knowledge there's very little
| data on that (for obvious reasons), but that should maybe lead to
| a little more prudence when it comes to weighing the negative
| effects of the much simpler to run studies.
|
| We use combustion engines, have noise, air and light pollution,
| move too little, sit on desks and use phones not because we enjoy
| harming ourselves, but because of the benefits attached. It's
| great that we run studies to learn more about how we are
| effected. But reasonable consequences, less clear.
| paraschopra wrote:
| Interesting study, I wonder if it could be easily replicated!
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Seeing almost feral iPad kids has put me off giving my children a
| portable screen, especially one with unrestricted access to the
| internet. The surprising part is I grew up around computers and
| the internet (got my first email when i was 4) and have always
| had a desktop PC around, but somehow gravitated towards building
| websites, small C games, and even though YouTube, Metacafe,
| Facebook, Miniclip were easily accessible, me and a lot of my
| peers never got addicted to them.
|
| Maybe it's the way games and apps are designed these days and
| attempt to hijack your attention, nearly all of them utilising a
| similar UX pattern (infinite scroll videos, stories, for example)
| and the effects it has on developing children could very well be
| magnitudes higher than how it affects adults severely stunting
| their intellectual growth. If adults are developing attention
| issues due to such patterns, can't imagine what it must do to
| children.
|
| I think I'm just going to give them a dumbphone, like a cheap
| Nokia and computer access at home, but also something else to
| think about is bullying that is pervasive based on your status
| and wealth often displayed as the latest iPhone, Playstations,
| etc and the chance of them being outcasts for not conforming to
| such structures.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Maybe it 's the way games and apps are designed these days
| and attempt to hijack your attention, nearly all of them
| utilising a similar UX pattern (infinite scroll videos,
| stories, for example)_
|
| I'm pretty sure that that's exactly the problem: modern phones
| and tablets are interactive TVs first and foremost that happen
| to have the capability to work like computers if you put in a
| lot of work.
|
| Even if all you did was play games in the pre-smartphone era,
| those games were not optimized for addiction and
| microtransactions.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I vividly remember conflicts with my parents over sitting in my
| room in front of a computer. Potential benefits are never
| obvious, and certainly not to everyone. "Small C games" seem
| innocuous in hindsight (specially through the hn lense), but
| could easily have been center of debate and concern of well
| meaning parents back then.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| You're absolutely right, thankfully my father was in the tech
| field back then and could very easily discern if I was
| wasting my time or actually learning/doing something. Even
| then I was scolded quite a number of times to go do my
| homework ^_^
|
| Creating a framework of communicating and channeling
| children's energy into a path that aids learning in today's
| attention/dopamine hungry world is something I'm still
| struggling with.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I tried writing C games when I was 12 and never got anywhere. I
| personally feel like I've cultivated quite the overgrowth of
| dopamine receptors now due to the access of the internet I had
| as a kid. Curiously, my parents tried to limit access for a
| long while, and for a long while, the desktop PC only had games
| and no internet. I do not think giving my child free access to
| the internet via a desktop would have a similar outcome to
| yours - not without replicating a whole lot of other
| environmental factors.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| Yeah, raising children in a world such as ours doesn't seem
| bereft of a number of variables that can skew the results of
| their upbringing.
|
| Sometimes I wish there was a standardised framework for
| raising children but they're too unique and individual for
| something like that to work.
| graemep wrote:
| > Maybe it's the way games and apps are designed these days and
| attempt to hijack your attention
|
| Very much this. I think a social media ban would have most of
| the benefits of a mobile phone ban.
|
| While you mention FB, you do not say when, and I do not think
| it was always as addictive.
|
| The other problem with phones is that thy are very much
| consumption devices. You are not going to build websites, let
| along games, on one.
|
| > bullying that is pervasive based on your status and wealth
| often displayed as the latest iPhone, Playstations, etc and the
| chance of them being outcasts for not conforming to such
| structures.
|
| The real solution there is to find a different environment for
| them. Unless its a really toxic environment, its not a big
| issue. Do you really want your kids to grow up with having to
| conform to status and wealth displays?
|
| People also tend to overestimate this. lots of people said my
| kids would be ostracised because we did not have a TV. it was
| not a problem.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| > While you mention FB, you do not say when, and I do not
| think it was always as addictive.
|
| You're correct, I haven't logged into my account since 2018,
| but I am talking about the period from 2007-2013, now I am
| assuming since Meta has Facebook & Instagram & Whatsapp the
| UX would be more or less the same across platforms like
| stories/reels or some form of infinite looped community
| engagement.
|
| > Unless its a really toxic environment, its not a big issue.
|
| I think bullying exists everywhere, it ranges from being
| explicit, like everybody knows what is going on to very
| implicit bullying which involves people being iced out from
| social circles slowly but surely, but I agree with your
| point, I'll do my best to equip my children with tools to
| navigate such scenarios, since they exist in adulthood as
| well. Also these experiences are imo essential for character
| development ie; being sure about who you are and where you
| come from without being swept up in the beliefs of your peer
| group.
| Tade0 wrote:
| My neighbours have a way out of this for their 8yo, even though
| their intention was to just stay in touch as he plays outside
| unsupervised: smartwatch.
|
| Functions perfectly well as a phone with some additional
| utilities, but doesn't draw the sort of attention an equivalent
| phone would if that's what you're going for.
| Hobadee wrote:
| My wife is a teacher. She could have told you this for free - no
| study needed.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I hope that by the time I have a kid at school age, that phone
| bans will be a common thing in schools in the UK.
| imaginationra wrote:
| Lifetime mobile phone abstinent human here.
|
| Sleep and mood (thumbs up)
|
| Waiting for everyone else to stop using the cursed devices and
| start to enjoy real life allowing themselves to be fully immersed
| in it for the first time(shrug)
|
| "Fully immersive" games are sought after but from my point of
| view people that use mobile phones have never been fully immersed
| in their physical reality before (its pretty sick bruh, there's
| beer and boobs) and you might enjoy experiences that can't be
| monetized or digitized (yes, they exist)
|
| If a human experiences an interaction in physical reality and
| there isn't a VC around to launch a startup to monetize said
| interaction does it even make a simd?
| andkenneth wrote:
| I wish I could do this. Do you even use a flip phone or
| anything? Or simply no cell phone?
| basisword wrote:
| How do you accomplish this (in detail if you don't mind - I'm
| very curious)? How do you keep in contact with others? Does
| your job not require a phone for e.g. 2FA? I'm increasingly
| coming up against obstacles to no-phone life now. For example,
| certain venues only distribute concert tickets via a phone app
| and their 'workaround' if you don't have one is 'ask a friend'.
| Have there been situations you've come across (e.g. some sort
| of emergency) which have made you reconsider having no phone?
| doug_durham wrote:
| Good for you, but you are implicitly engaging in the naturalist
| fallacy. Phones are objects. Social media and gambling-like
| games that exploit the limbic system. If you want to regulate
| those that would be a good start.
| rob_c wrote:
| We did _not_ need a study on this.
|
| Schools used to ban mobile devices at the door and at some point
| gave up, like everything, someone gave up.
|
| Private schools in the UK still have this policy and are still
| churning out better grades and students regardless of whether
| they charge admission or not. Public ones have turned into a
| nursery ruled by the kids from that X generation of handouts.
|
| Just go back to giving a dam and it will fix at least this thing.
| But I'll get stick and b$ for students being social online these
| days now I bet...
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Do you ever get periods of time where you're just not interested
| in your phone? Periods of time when you don't even feel the
| compulsion to unlock your phone and scroll, so there's no real
| willpower required to abstain from it?
|
| That's the state of mind I want to be at. I don't want to have to
| lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.
|
| I do get those streaks of no doom scrolling from time to time,
| perhaps for a few weeks at a time, but, for now, I keep reverting
| back to my old compulsions. But I will keep working on it :)
| k8sToGo wrote:
| I have those periods when I'm busy with other things. If not
| busy, then the phone is a way to stay busy.
|
| Don't think we can truly idle and sit there and do nothing.
|
| If you do not want to unlock and scroll, find something that
| keeps you busy and is more entertaining than whatever you have
| on the phone.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Don't think we can truly idle and sit there and do nothing.
|
| Of course we can. It's quite enjoyable in the right
| circumstances.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| It's also the mother of creativity. Endless relatively high
| quality entertainment is one of those things that sounds
| amazing at a distance but has probably just been an overall
| significant negative on society.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| try out a cat s22
| zuppy wrote:
| I was in the same place and I found a solution that works for
| me and it almost made me totally quit Instagram (the thing that
| was taking my time). Set the notifications to be shown on lock
| screen only for critical apps (phone, sms, etc) and configure
| the others to just show badge counters. Now, at this point you
| have red bubbles everywhere, for this issue (on iOS, but I'm
| sure it's a solution for Android too) you apply a shade for all
| the app icons. It's a feature that came with iOS 18. Even if
| this seems small, the fact that you don't see them all in red,
| makes a huge difference. Now, I only look when I want to look.
| doble-io wrote:
| I really hope you get what you want the way you describe, but
| for everyone else reading this: don't dismiss hacks like
| unplugging your router.
|
| Everyone should use external control (aka stimulus control [1])
| more shamelessly. Stimulus control is a well-known technique
| that gets the job done for day-to-day problems like "phone
| compulsion."
|
| When you ask what willpower is, people think of "magical mental
| points." Common knowledge suggests that needing external
| control (like putting away your phone) means you lack
| willpower, spirit, maturity, or you're-not-going-to-make-
| it(tm). Like there are two opposite camps: willpower/rational
| decision making/system II [2] vs external control. This is
| unwise and is not supported scientifically.
|
| Let me explain in CS-like terms: If life is a search problem,
| the action space is insanely enormous. Sitting in my office, I
| could jump, eat a candy bar, look at my phone, throw my
| computer, play the cello, sing, or work. The first "pruning" is
| simply availability - I won't play the cello since I don't have
| one here.
|
| The same applies to distractions. We live in a digital
| environment where accessing distractions costs nearly zero. So
| maintaining cognitive hygiene through stimulus control
| (switching off your router, putting away your phone) is good.
|
| Sadly, willpower is what common knowledge sets as the
| good/moral/mature behavior: if you need to put away your phone,
| you are less valid or whatever culture-specific narrative
| you're into. Ignore those ideas and keep your mind clean: put
| your router on fire if that's what you need at first. You will
| get better.
|
| [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/stimulus-
| con... [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Two_sy...
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Nono, I specifically mentioned no willpower required. Like in
| your example of available actions, I also have zero desire to
| jump out of the window, so don't have to expend any willpower
| to resist it. Similarly, on my good days, I don't feel
| attracted to my phone. What do you say about that?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is the default for me. A smartphone is a versatile but
| inferior device in terms of UX.
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is
| the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored
| for engagement (a.k.a addiction)?
|
| Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should
| consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on
| purpose.
| beeflet wrote:
| so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?
| d4rti wrote:
| Banning phones is the practical policy. Schools could not
| police the myriad of apps and websites.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| To what end? Why do school kids need a smartphone?
| pmg101 wrote:
| "Love and belonging" is the third in Maslow's Hierarchy of
| Needs.
|
| It's difficult to feel a sense of belonging if all your peers
| have access to something you don't, even worse if that
| something is your social space itself.
|
| (Full disclosure: I am rampantly anti smartphone. But I
| understand kids' need to have it.)
| mlinhares wrote:
| That's why we need blanket bans where no one has a
| smartphone at school.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| Bingo.
| sebgan wrote:
| We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when
| they are away, especially when they have after school sports,
| at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment
| opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the
| "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone
| basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device.
| Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of
| the OS which I, as the parent, can control.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and
| locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have
| experience locking down iPhones against a motivated
| adversary (their child) within the last few years.
| dmart wrote:
| No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation)
| is easily circumventable, includes a "One More Minute"
| feature that can't be disabled, doesn't sync properly,
| manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways... I could go
| on. It's disastrous, like an intern-level project that
| was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the
| only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps
| aren't even possible, they ultimately just serve as
| alternate frontends for Screen Time.
| sensanaty wrote:
| You can just buy them a dumb phone? No reason they need a
| smartphone just for messages and calls
| sebgan wrote:
| True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a
| smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not
| all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart
| phone dumb than the other way around.
| AngryData wrote:
| You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS
| you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that
| effects how much and what people are messaging you and is
| the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People
| sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing
| to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell
| they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a
| reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to
| display right or at all.
| eitally wrote:
| There are a lot of things schools themselves have done that
| end up essentially requiring it. Here's a short list from my
| kids' district:
|
| * Use an LMS called Infinite Canvas. Among other things, the
| kids have to submit homework online -- which can be done on
| the web app -- which often requires them to take a photo of
| handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a
| photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook?
|
| * Use Teamsnap for sports team management: scheduling, roster
| management, messaging, etc.
|
| * Use Instagram for school-official communications, including
| things like social events, counseling services, college
| visits, and sports team news.
|
| ... There are more, but the point is that phone apps make
| certain things easy and schools are taking advantage of that
| fact, even if they're simultaneously banning them during
| school hours.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten
| work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a
| piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook?
|
| No, but I've used a scanner before. Surely that's still an
| option?
|
| Maybe it's unusual that we've kept them, but both my
| ancient inkjet and my wife's ancient laser printer both
| have flatbed scanners on top.
| nottorp wrote:
| Having a printer is unusual too :)
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| None of those things sound essential or without analog or
| laptop workarounds.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Sure, the difference is that one solution is immediately
| accessible to a school, and the other will be lobbied against
| by billionaires for a decade before meaningful change has a
| chance to happen.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| Yeah, it is down to the apps, not the phone as a device as
| such. Engagement driven software exists on consoles and PCs /
| laptops as well, and I'm not even talking about "social media"
| stuff, but pretty much all live service games and beyond. In
| return, I've stumbled over people that cannot even imagine why
| someone would take a smartphone into a far off-grid area,
| because for them the phone is synonymous with "always on" and
| all these stupid apps.
|
| Problem is, the regulations regarding all that will take much
| much longer because the very fact all this engagement driven
| software is actual poison for the brain hasn't reached the
| stage where you can just hammer down facts and drown everyone
| who still thinks this is a good idea. They should show how all
| that affects overall productivity and all the billions and
| trillions they throw out of the window, how it pours oil into
| the fire of more and more people being overly stressed (which
| is not just work causing this) etc.
| jrtageh wrote:
| For increased happiness it is the ban of addictive websites.
| Likes, dislikes and most importantly, _flagging, censoring and
| cancelling_ , externalizes your locus of control and makes you
| think that you live in a dystopian world.
|
| The Internet wasn't this bad when people were on Usenet and no
| one would censor your thoughts.
|
| For cognitive abilities it is the phone ban itself.
| qwjd wrote:
| Naturally, this comment is flagged. Naturally, without
| explanation, as is the practice of dystopian wankers.
| docmars wrote:
| I think you make a really great point:
|
| Living with the social (organic) consequences of sharing
| unpopular opinions is much better than being silenced and
| digitally imprisoned, because the latter takes away one's
| dignity to think or build community around ideas which
| disagree with the status quo.
| baconmania wrote:
| This is an enormously disingenuous take. When Usenet was the
| only game in town, children were not stumbling into
| hyperoptimized addictive experiences tailored to every flick
| of their eyes. You don't think that thousands of engineers
| building TikTok or Instagram to hijack your child's literal
| capacity for attention and healthy social development
| "externalizes your locus of control"?
|
| Reducing the algorithmic targeting of children (by taking
| away phones or otherwise) is no more censorship than telling
| someone to stop standing in front of you and shouting in your
| face.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's the phones. There has to be outright bans or restrictions
| put on them and the apps. But the schools also are app-enabled
| these days. My 7th grader has to respond to email from the
| teacher on assignments.
|
| But back to the apps and social media, when we put restrictions
| on use and got back to the real focus on family and school,
| then the healing started. It was instant.
|
| I encourage everyone to have phone timeouts.
| Levitating wrote:
| Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that
| could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with
| it all the time.
|
| Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for
| endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to
| scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even
| being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your
| face.
|
| It's extremely addictive and imo harmful. It ruins attention
| spans, it ruins social development and it causes insecurities.
|
| I am in favor of banning smartphones in schools. I have seen
| what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me
| and it's just depressing.
| warner25 wrote:
| Well, I think it's the _combination_ of the apps as you
| described with the devices to connect to them always being
| within arms reach. Take away either one (or take away the
| unlimited, always-on network access, like I have a 500 MB per
| month data plan) and I think we 're having a very different
| conversation.
|
| > seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger
| than me and it's just depressing
|
| I'll make the obligatory point that the situation seems not
| much better for older people (Millennials, Boomers, etc.) who
| are also consuming a shocking amount of video on their phones
| throughout the day, to the point of it being anti-social.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I mean, snake still has a lot of appeal.
| amalcon wrote:
| One of these things is in the power of the school district, as
| long as they can convince local parents that it's a good idea
| (not easy, but studies help). The other is in the power of...
| who? Possibly nobody. Possibly the American federal government
| -- but it's not even clear that they have the power to do this.
|
| Either way, the same "they" does not have agency over both
| things. It makes sense to consider the thing you can actually
| do.
| tootie wrote:
| Sorry for posting this more than once, but it's not anything:
|
| https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
|
| The York study was a tiny set of kids and the only change was
| sleep pattern. There have been numerous studies done on larger
| groups and they results coalesce around screens not being a
| problem.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| All because of the pervasive ad-based business model. Ban ads
| and things will change. Some says "ad are easy because payments
| are too costly" but the day we ban ads, payment processors will
| change their own model to make sure they capture all the market
| previously owned by ads. And freemium works for platforms that
| pretend their users can't pay.
| bdcravens wrote:
| How do you police what's addictive on purpose vs what's
| addictive by use? Who polices the difference between addictive
| additives versus standard driving of engagement? After all, I
| think sites/apps Youtube or even Hacker News would be guilty
| depending on how you draw the lines.
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| For starters, forbid behaviour and engagement surveillance.
| Without that data it would be impossible to fine tune the
| apps to be addictive for each individual. Just with that,
| it'd probably tackle most of the "device addiction". Then if
| you want to go the extra mile, consider forbidding things
| like personalised recommendations, infinite scrolling, auto-
| play-next, loots and even notifications on by default.
| tclancy wrote:
| Think of it more like banning them in movie theaters. It's not
| necessarily what one kid is doing, it's the effect on the
| whole.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Both. It's tailored for addiction in a portable device that's
| never turned off.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether
| they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest?
|
| Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like
| the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world.
|
| I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or
| usage of smartphones or their software.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I don't know any single anti-gun-regulation person who
| manufactures guns. Anyways. I am not app developer blah blah
| and I'm against this. Don't want your kids to be cash cows?
| Don't give them a credit card...?
| onlyontheapi wrote:
| do they drive revenue from ads too?
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| What ads? The ads I blocked with PiHole?
| frde_me wrote:
| You just went to where 99% of parents don't even know how
| to get to. Do you think it should be expected of parents
| to figure out how to use whatever "PiHole" is to protect
| their kids?
|
| I admire your personal dedication to making it as hard as
| possible to be exploited, but we really can't expect non-
| tech people to go to the same lengths. And at one point,
| we might have to admit that parents who spend 99% of
| their time struggling to even get by and do the basics
| for their kids need schools and other resources to help
| out by doing things such as banning phones.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| My point is - it's under my control, if I didn't know how
| to do this I'd either accept the ads, pay, or not allow
| phone usage. There are options. I don't need the
| government to do that for me, I can decide myself.
|
| Here in Europe, phone is necessary for daily life - even
| as a kid. And it makes it so much easier, better - and
| interesting, if you teach your kids that. My kids use
| their phone like a Star Trek tricorder, using various
| apps and tools to learn about the world around them.
| Something I wished was possible when I was a kid but it
| was a pure scifi - now it's here and I'm not going to
| take that away from them just because some bureaucrat
| thinks parents can't control their kids enough.
| frde_me wrote:
| I'm going to go to an extreme, but if we had solid
| research that said banning phones at school resulted in
| some extreme, lets say 50%, improvement in their ability
| to learn, would you support the ban of phones during
| school time? Would you expect the school to _not_
| implement a policy that would benefit learning that much?
|
| What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles
| during class", would that infringe on your kids personal
| freedom too much?
|
| In a world where parents feed their children fast food
| all the time, and let them play mindless Ipad games from
| an early age, I have lower faith in every parent reading
| the relevant literature and implementing best practices
| than I have in academic institutions figuring out how to
| optimize learning (not that I have a huge amount of faith
| in that either, just more)
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| No, I wouldn't support that policy. That would be like
| banning paper because someone prints porn on it. Absurd.
| frde_me wrote:
| If I follow through what you said, paper has obvious
| positive impact in schools, or we can at least imagine
| that positive impact. And so banning paper would be very
| likely not to result in an improvement if studied. And
| like any smartphone ban, it _should_ be studied
| rigorously before implementing.
|
| But lets say they do find that smart phones during class
| _are_ good, but just social media is bad, then it also
| sounds reasonable to me that a kids phone might be
| required to have some type of block on social media app
| during class time. Just like it sounds reasonable for a
| school to ban papers _with porn printed on them_ during
| class time. There's no issue besides on a practical level
| with getting more fine grained and isolating the impact.
|
| Or do you also oppose that later, is your kid printing
| porn on paper and bringing it to school part of the
| personal freedom you want control over and which the
| school should not have to authority to ban?
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I'm pretty fine with restrictions on usage during class
| time - but not by direct remote control of such personal
| devices. The goal is to improve education and prepare
| children for life in the modern world. That can't be done
| without a smartphone, the most important item of most
| people that they use to run their lives. Today, many
| normal people don't even have desktop computers, they do
| everything on phones. That has privacy implications on
| what is reasonable to do with a person's phone - even a
| child has right to their privacy (in reasonable limits of
| course).
| criddell wrote:
| My kids' high school requires kids to have a phone. They
| want the kids using the calendar to track assignments.
| The ask the kids to use the camera to take a photo of the
| board which contains their homework assignment. They use
| some messaging app where they can communicate with the
| teacher and the teacher can talk to individuals or the
| entire class. They've had assignments where they need to
| shoot a short movie with their phones.
|
| I've never heard anybody say this, but I think one of
| their goals is to teach appropriate use of phones.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Do you have children? It sounds like you don't since you
| are talking like someone on the outside. I'm not saying
| that would change your position, but you'd be talking
| with more nuance if you did.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I don't need the government to do that for me, I can
| decide myself.
|
| What frustrates me about these discussions is the same
| pro-libertine knee jerk individualist response is
| parroted for it, even though this choice _is not
| impacting you,_ or at least, not only and for the
| purposes of the topic, any impact on you is ancillary.
| These decisions _impact your children, and not just now,
| but for the rest of their lives._ If all goes to plan,
| the ripple effects from these choices will be in motion
| still long after you are dead.
|
| It's the same kind of irritated I get when parents are
| advocating for themselves having say over school
| curricula, testing standards, sports programs, what have
| you over trained professionals who's entire careers are
| centered on getting kids the best outcomes possible, but
| who must argue as though the opinions of Bernadette
| Peters, who has never left Blenheim, South Carolina in
| her 37 years on this planet, also has input to offer.
|
| And like, this isn't a criticism of you, it sounds like
| you're doing it as close to right as one can manage. _And
| also,_ what about all the kids at the school who 's
| parents don't know what you know? What about all the ones
| who lack the knowledge to pass on, let alone the will to?
| What about ones who's kiddos struggle with tech in
| general, either because of ignorance, or because of
| neuro-divergence, or because of accessibility issues, or
| any number of other problems?
|
| You're effectively arguing that because you've taught
| your kids how to consume alcohol in a healthy way that
| they should be able to carry booze to school. However
| true that might be for your kids, there are also other
| kids around too, and the school admin is responsible for
| all of them, not just yours.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| I have a big problem with comparing a pocket
| supercomputer to booze. It's nothing like that. And I
| don't just think that because I can manage, everyone else
| can. I also think that this regulation will be counter
| productive.
|
| You raised an interesting point while talking about the
| professionals at school vs some backwater person. I wish
| I had your trust in their good intentions and abilities,
| but where I live these supposed professionals don't even
| speak English, and they're pushing their conservative
| agendas. It isn't unusual that my kid googles some
| bullshit a teacher says and it's proven wrong by a fact
| checking organization. For example, if my kids couldn't
| fact check all the shit they said during covid, I would
| be very unhappy.
| kelipso wrote:
| Acting like kids are so easily controlled. You just need the
| passcode if you credit card is in apple wallet, for example.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| Why would my credit card be in their Apple Wallet?
| kelipso wrote:
| Point is that things happen if you are not super careful.
| They could use your phone, you could have forgotten about
| it, etc etc. Not everyone is some carefully planning nerd
| who remembers everything all the time.
| thrw42A8N wrote:
| If they use my phone to purchase something, abusing my
| access code in the process, they are grounded for weeks
| and many other privileges will be taken away. I myself
| have never dared to touch my father's wallet or phone, or
| even look at him typing his password.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| > Not everyone is some carefully planning nerd who
| remembers everything all the time.
|
| I chuckled at this. The "carefully planning nerds" are
| being ruthlessly called out here, and I for one did not
| see it coming.
| criddell wrote:
| For very small children it probably doesn't make sense,
| but when they get a bit older it's not that unusual. My
| kids have my credit card on their phone for when they
| need it.
|
| They are also joint owners of our bank accounts. We've
| told them if they ever get the news that we have died,
| they should go withdraw a bunch of money to carry them
| over until all the estate stuff settles.
| tommica wrote:
| Damn, it's impressive how trusting you are with them. My
| parents would never had done that.
|
| Seems like your kids are being raised well.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, it is definitely something unheard of around here
| (never heard of a kid having their parents' credit cards)
| in Eastern Europe, for all I know.
| criddell wrote:
| Sharing a credit card doesn't take an huge amount of
| trust. Every time a charge is made on my card, a
| notification flies by on my phone. If they abuse the
| card, I would find out right away.
| gmerc wrote:
| Attention itself is being milked, it has very little to do
| with money on the frontline. We a/b test these products,
| genetically pruning them to maximum addictiveness ("time
| spent on platform") and peer pressure / virality and we're
| maximizing people's attention spent. Adults are unable to
| handle it, kids even less so.
|
| Even if you play Roblox for free, you're a) still critical to
| the developer (whale economics require many peasants for the
| whales to feel comfortable spending themselves to higher
| status), and you're still trading off activities that benefit
| you long term (reading, learning, actually interacting with
| the non toxic world)
| gxs wrote:
| Exactly, the fact that people think this comment has to do
| with explicit credit card transactions shows how unaware
| people are of all the other implications.
|
| You said it best - the currency is eyeballs - even if you
| aren't spending they want your attention without a single
| regard for the consequences.
|
| One of those things that seems benign for any given app,
| but in aggregate has negative effects after
| hours/days/weeks/years of screen time and interactions with
| all the attention stealing content.
| api wrote:
| I call social media and other addictionware companies the
| "tobacco companies of the mind."
|
| The problem isn't the phone per se. It's the apps, which is why
| I don't have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app
| approval with kids.
|
| Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples' wallets,
| but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political
| discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines
| hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-
| maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one
| side) lost their mind.
|
| Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don't maximize engagement.
| Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid
| trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.
|
| We've kind of known since the dawn of media that trash
| maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get
| trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.
| greentxt wrote:
| Right, mainstream news has been doing this same clickbait for
| half century at least and it is the reason we allow it from
| social media. We're desensitized to it and actually seek it
| out. We live to suffer and be enraged, because in our minds
| democracy depends upon it.
| api wrote:
| At some point I think humanity is going to have to really
| declare war on addiction. I've been thinking about this for
| years.
|
| It's not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium
| for one example.
|
| I'm all for free speech and I am against drug
| criminalization-- as long as in both cases the stuff is not
| particularly addictive.
|
| The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or
| control other people whether through substances, tech, or
| other media should be a crime. It could be considered a
| form of assault.
|
| It would be a crime to implant a chip in someone while they
| slept that could be used to remotely regulate their
| emotions somehow, right? How is deliberate deployment of
| addiction different? Instead of implanting something you
| are exploiting what amounts to a CVE in the human brain.
| It's a crime to break into your computer using a zero day,
| but it's okay for me to hack your brain?
|
| This is the "Butlerian Jihad" we need -- not against
| technology but against addiction. "Thou shalt not exploit
| security vulnerabilities in the human mind."
|
| We know enough about the mechanisms of addiction that I
| think we can be reasonably objective about identifying it.
|
| A first step might be to make it civilly actionable. If you
| can prove that someone deliberately worked to make their
| product addictive they can be the target of a class action
| lawsuit. You could, for example, sue social media companies
| for the hours of lost time resulting from their addictive
| designs.
| largbae wrote:
| I like the idea of fighting addiction, but it can't be
| law-based. For example, I find chess to be addictive, is
| that evil? What action shall we take against it?
| api wrote:
| I think it would have to be reserved for egregious cases
| to start with, and perhaps that would be enough to have a
| chilling effect and scare people away from intentional
| addiction engineering.
|
| I share concerns about this but I feel like eventually it
| won't matter. We are getting so good at addicting each
| other and it's getting so ubiquitous that eventually I
| think there will be a crusade with a lot of collateral
| damage.
|
| Either that or we will just accept a society with a
| massive Matrix-like addict slave class. Maybe that's the
| outcome.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| I'll be using "tobacco companies of the mind"!
|
| It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social
| degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being
| highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd
| think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people
| dance around and explain away the situation.
|
| It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as
| any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a
| sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a
| way out of the situation (barring some major technological or
| social shift, provoked by who knows what).
| joenot443 wrote:
| I'm an app developer who's spent my career building excellent
| iOS apps, previously with Google and Snap.
|
| I have every intention of raising my kids as far away from
| smartphones as possible, ideally until they're at least
| teenagers. My fiance and I have already discussed keeping the
| household as de-screened as possible, it's something we
| consider a lot.
|
| It's interesting you'd suggest that an app developer would have
| a conflict of interest that other engineers might not. In my
| experience, engineers who work with mobile apps, especially
| ones in the social space, are way, _way_ more likely to
| understand and be wary about the dangers in overexposing kids
| to a life of feeds. Colloquially, we call this "seeing how the
| sausage gets made".
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| That's exactly what I was going to say. Every software dev I
| know who works on apps, social media, etc. all keep their
| kids from going _near_ the shit. They know, conflict of
| interest or not. I 've not seen anyone behind these products
| once they hit a mature state where they start psychologically
| stripmining their audiences who's eager to get any of their
| family onboarded.
| joshuakcockrell wrote:
| I worked on the Twitter iOS app. Can confirm my kid isn't
| allowed a phone until they're a teen. Once they get one,
| I'll be spending hours figuring out how to MDM brick the
| thing so they can't get anywhere near social media.
|
| Having said that, I'm still an app dev (personal finance &
| budgeting) and I'm excited to onboard my kid into that
| world.
| philsnow wrote:
| Apple Configurator.app
|
| You can set the phone to only run an approved list of
| apps (like Phone and Messages, and that's it, no App
| Store)
| vladgur wrote:
| Can you expand on it?
|
| Screentime control are absolutely lackluster
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Hopefully with some future update. You are totally right
| - badly needed thing
| adolph wrote:
| I have a notion that home mdm plus network controls is
| necessary (and using mdm to ensure vpn thru the latter).
|
| iOS controls have worked well enough so far but the
| school chromebooks have nada.
| tyre wrote:
| It's sad that these people know this and still work on
| them. I can't imagine living my life day-in, day-out
| knowingly making other people's lives worse.
| Jensson wrote:
| You can work on a bad thing to try to make it less bad,
| you not being there would make peoples lives worse since
| the app would still exist but be even worse.
| largbae wrote:
| They aren't _people_, they are just Daily Active Users.
| (/s)
| adolph wrote:
| Name any industry and there's probably some negative
| aspect to it. Everything sufficiently effective at
| anything has a high potential for misuse.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| I'd qualify that phrase as, "seeing how the _factory_ sausage
| gets made ".
|
| Social media at the start may have been neutral to slightly
| negative, but once creators started optimizing and the
| various "algorithms" were installed and A/B tested, what came
| out the end is some pretty nasty stuff mentally. Junk food
| for the soul.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| IME tech folks are, on average, more in-tune with the "keep
| kids away from screens" thing than the general population. I
| think we know enough about it to fear it.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Like the old joke: A non-programmer will fill their houses
| with tech: TV, internet-connected fire alarm, security
| cameras, Alexa...
|
| A programmer keeps an axe on the wall next to the electric
| kettle.
| bdcravens wrote:
| We could also disclose who is a parent and who isn't, to make
| decisions about which comments to deprioritize.
| II2II wrote:
| There are plenty of people who work with children yet may not
| have children: teachers, child care workers, medical doctors,
| psychologists, social workers, etc.. In each case, we see
| children in contexts that parents do not. In some of those
| professions, we may even see individual children more than
| their parents do. Perhaps it is best to avoid deprioritizing
| people simply because they don't meet an arbitrary criteria.
|
| (I've had people scream at me because I am not a parent. When
| they found out what I do professionally, they were
| immediately humbled.)
| tclancy wrote:
| It would also be nice to attach what ages your kids are,
| because someone arguing against Big Brother and censorship
| sounds a lot like someone who doesn't have to get a kid to bed
| tonight. Not that opinions can't be valid, but let's have our
| cards on the table.
| temporarara wrote:
| Reading a book to young kids worked wonders back then and
| once they were old enough to run outside without supervision
| they exhausted themselves quite naturally at the end of the
| day. You can really do million productive things with kids if
| they aren't feeling sleepy instead of dooming them to bad
| sleep with those screens.
| doug_durham wrote:
| "Those screens". How about just "screens".
| temporarara wrote:
| No, I mean "those screens" in this very specific context,
| not just some random "screens".
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm. There are other kinds of apps you know, besides free to
| play and social drugs.
|
| The only mobile phone app I did is a boring industrial thing
| that reads some sensors and massages the data however the user
| directs it. It's so boring I bet no one ever starts it except
| during work hours.
| interludead wrote:
| Yep, there's often a lot of money at play, and it's easy for
| the conversation to become less about kids' well-being and more
| about protecting profits
| mordae wrote:
| I run a youth tech club and honestly, attention to what we do vs.
| phones is all about whether kids are 1) engaged, 2) not tired. To
| drive engagement, they must have something to do, while
| progressing and seeing immediate results. I don't believe that's
| what normally happens at school.
| neycoda wrote:
| People under 16 shouldn't have smartphones. They should be taken
| during class, put on a shoe hanger. They should be put away
| during dinner and family time. Smartphones and tablets are
| ruining people during the time they need to learn and grow the
| most. I can't imagine what this generation will be like,
| especially mixed with all the greed, exploitation, and neglect
| coming from the top down by the people established before them.
| caturopath wrote:
| Filed under "Kids these days"
| ben_hn wrote:
| It's not phones or tablets. It's the wrong doing apps / social
| netwrks / games. Same applies to friends: there are friend
| circles that bring only bad behaviors. We don't ban friendship
| because of that. Ban social network apps. Ban addictive games.
| Ban notifications and any other FOMO-triggering mechanisms. Don't
| ban phones.
| dmd wrote:
| This is the same argument people make for not banning guns, and
| it's a bad argument there too.
| ben_hn wrote:
| I've never lived in a country where carrying gun is allowed
| and im not much familiar with the topic, so I won't comment
| on that. But I lived through the time that there was no phone
| and then when there were phones with non of these junk apps
| on them and now. This, I believe, makes it very clear, what
| the real cause of these problems is.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| It is certainly a stronger argument in the gun case, since
| defensive usage significantly outweighs criminal usage and
| most people don't even shoot anyone. Here we're dealing with
| a situation where being addicted to your smartphone is the
| norm, not the exception.
| huuhee3 wrote:
| Banning phones is simpler, and has no downsides. You are at
| school to learn, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.
|
| Besides, lots of things can be addictive and distracting.
| Personally I'm addicted to reading news. Had smartphones
| existed when I was a kid, simply banning social media and games
| wouldn't have been enough.
| dalton01 wrote:
| Banning phones has no downsides. You're in the office to
| work, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, people do need to reach you and people mostly aren't
| chained to their desks in an office any longer so you do
| need a phone of some sort. No, you don't need a tablet in
| general and I mostly never used one in a professional
| capacity.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Children vs. adults...
|
| Although many of us adults, myself included, could
| definitely use a strict break from the screens.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| OK, but anyone who makes this argument should at least put some
| effort into thinking about how to _define_ what is a social
| network, and what is an _addictive_ game. It's not that you're
| wrong, but you need to think about the execution and making
| sure that the criteria has a strong basis in principle that can
| be used to justify the decisions on what to ban. Otherwise
| you're just suggesting the impossible
| ben_hn wrote:
| You're right. Defining the criteria for marking an app as
| harmful might not be straightforward or easy. But we're
| talking about the education and life of the children. These
| difficulties shouldn't a preventing factor. Maybe it's easier
| to allow services and apps one by one when there is a need
| only. Whatever that's not, let kids have a phone with
| internet and everything that comes along.
| amluto wrote:
| There were plenty of games around when I was a kid, and I'm
| not convinced they were materially less addictive. But none
| of them could fit in my pocket or could send me
| notifications.
| tootie wrote:
| It's nothing. This study is narrow and shows no changes in
| cognitive capability, only sleep. A huge longitudinal study has
| shown screen time has minimal effect on cognitive ability or
| behavior of kids:
|
| https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
|
| There are far worse things in modern culture that are stressing
| out kids out.
| greentxt wrote:
| Do you suppose that study is the final word on topic?
| Replication is an important part of the scientific process,
| as are converging lines of evidence.
| tootie wrote:
| The study I linked covered 12000 kids across demographics.
| You can dig through studies all you want there is scant
| evidence to implicate screen time for anything. And yet
| parents are so utterly convinced.
|
| We are ignoring the obvious which is that children's
| anxiety and depression is caused by the same things as
| adults.
| create-username wrote:
| It's only sleep, something that is not related with mental
| health, adolescents barely need and they already indulge a
| lot in
| greentxt wrote:
| Define phone. See.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Just ban advertising. Everything follows from the all out war
| on attention, and ads are its fuel.
| njarboe wrote:
| I have a pretty libertarian steak, but I do sometimes think
| that banning advertising in general might be so beneficial
| for society that it would be worth taking the free speech
| hit. Not sure how in the hell you enforce it though. "What is
| an ad?", for example.
| FabHK wrote:
| One thing I enjoyed when I drove through Incheon and Seoul,
| Korea, recently was that there were basically no
| ads/billboards outside.
| create-username wrote:
| Sure. That's why I guess that my teenage pupils are actually
| researching scientific evidence when I catch them bare handed
| rubbing their laps.
|
| I give them the benefit of the doubt because it's not the
| mobile phone in class what's damaging, but only very few uses
| of it
| linhns wrote:
| Sounds a good policy but inherently not enforceable. Will end
| up similar to privacy as there's simply no way to effectively
| control the offshoots. You ban social networks, they will
| masquerade it into self-development products. You ban addictive
| games, they present an argument of socialising, etc...
| nightowl_games wrote:
| In my province, they implemented a smart phone ban in public
| schools this year. It was wild to see the political push back,
| where people just made stuff up to oppose it because they were
| politically opposed to the government in general.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in
| the UK.
|
| Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here
| is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even
| after school. They lost access to the phone completely during
| that time.
|
| I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids,
| because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of
| letting kids go out and socialise. We need to provide spaces for
| kids to be kids, and safe.
|
| However I do think social media use should be severely
| restricted, unfiltered video being zapped into young minds is not
| the way to build a cohesive society. tiktok/reels/youtube should
| probably be editorialised so that we can avoid the stupid,
| bullying and dangerous stuff being spread by arseholes.
|
| Furthermore I think phone use should be time limited by default.
| That is, the default is that the phone stops all notifications
| after 20:00 apart from things like parents.
|
| I have two kids, and I despair at other parents who think its
| fine to allow their 10/11 year olds to start group video calls at
| >20:30. Or the ones who let their kids bully on the class
| whatsapp.
|
| Part of this is education, most of it is tech companies wanting
| to make money from kids (including mine.)
| quotemstr wrote:
| Who gets to decide which messages teens get to expose
| themselves to? You? Why? We've had ten years of outrageous
| censorship. No nore, even for kids.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| some types of content are indisputably disturbing for kids,
| like violence, war footage, sexualized content (esp. a
| sexualized female image targeting male kids & teens), etc
| cma wrote:
| So outlaw Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit? Will dating before
| 21 without a religious chaperone be OK?
| gosub100 wrote:
| We can recruit them to fight in a war, but it might be
| disturbing to show them what they signed up for.
| Thorrez wrote:
| We can recruit kids to fight in a war?
| ninalanyon wrote:
| People who are too young to do all or some of vote,
| drink, drive a car, etc., can join the army in some
| countries such as the US.
| immibis wrote:
| Is it censorship when school teaches you maths but not how to
| skibidi a toilet?
| causality0 wrote:
| I had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten
| onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I
| would have been much better off as a person without it.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i think about this a lot as someone who had unfiltered
| access to the internet since being a kid around 2010. on
| the one hand i learned to understand english as a young
| boy, on my own, without realizing. on the other hand i've
| seen videos of beheadings, terrorist acts, violent
| accidents, war crimes and many more, lovely things.
|
| that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative.
| feels positive to me, just not without there being negative
| aspects.
| DirkH wrote:
| I agree with you that it isn't necessarily net-negative.
|
| I cannot begin to tell you how much more respect and care
| I give to the road and cars after witnessing so many
| videos of how violently and suddenly car accidents can
| take a life. Many of the horrors of these videos are
| burnt into my mind and I am confident this is for the
| better.
|
| We live in the real world. It is important to see the
| real world as it is.
|
| There are if course mental health limits to this. I never
| want to be desensitized. But in moderation I think it can
| be net-positive.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > We live in the real world. It is important to see the
| real world as it is.
|
| yeah, agree. i guess there's a balance you gotta reach
| between 'seeing the real world as it is when you're
| adult' and 'watching a terrorist behead a captive in 4k
| as a kid'.
|
| i mean there is some kind of bias at play in our
| societies, as i remember watching documentaries at school
| as a 13-14 year old, clearly displaying mass-graves at
| nazi concentration camps. i appreciate having been
| educated about this topic in such a direct way, yet is is
| very gruesome and haunting as well.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Same. Im not sure if growing up watching liveleak and
| browsing 4chan made me a better or worse person.
|
| I think the real effect on my life is that I was addicted
| to the internet and video games and didn't socialize
| enough. My life turned out good, I'm married and have a
| decent life, but I think I missed out a lot in my
| university years because I was playing counter strike
| instead of going out and socializing and making friends.
| I look back now at how much time I squandered (tens of
| thousands of hours) but I guess many people feel this way
| about their younger self.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| I'm probably a couple of years younger than you, or at
| least still in this phase you're describing. Love being
| home and gaming, just got back from a LAN where I played
| Counter Strike with three friends.
|
| If your life turned out good, there's not much to gain
| from worrying about the past :)
| causality0 wrote:
| Exactly. How many hours of WoW makes up for having to
| explain to a girl in her 20s that it's your first date?
| How much YouTube does it take to forget that you had to
| use your cousin as your best man? How many up-votes does
| it cost to make sure the person who picks your retirement
| home isn't a stranger?
|
| I also lucked out and ended up married to someone I love,
| but thinking about the number of experiences I missed out
| on for lack of trying is enough to make my chest feel
| tight. You have so much time right up until you don't.
| II2II wrote:
| I heard rumours of such content on the Internet as a
| teenager in the 1990's. I was never curious enough to
| seek it out, but there are plenty who were and plenty of
| those didn't understand how it would affect them. The
| latter group are the ones that we have to be concerned
| about. After all there is a world of difference between
| knowing of or seeing acts of violence and normalizing
| violence. Depending how far normalizing goes, it may end
| up being a net-negative for society as a whole.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Thank you. We always hear from the geek who only learned to
| program solely due to unfiltered internet access growing
| up. But not folks like you.
|
| I personally learned to program before widespread internet
| access, so know it's not at all a requirement.
| mateus1 wrote:
| The idea that parent control is censorship is very funny.
| Kid's brains shouldn't be exposed to addictive and
| exploitative content.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Where'd you get ten years from?
| interludead wrote:
| I agree, we need to regulate tech more thoughtfully, yet we
| also need to rebuild a culture that allows kids to connect
| novaRom wrote:
| > stops all notifications after 20:00
|
| Better to stop absolutely all notifications. When I need to
| know if someone of my friends is asking something I can open a
| chat app and check. If something is urgent then just a phone
| call. The amount of distractions is enormous, thus disabling it
| by law might be more effective solution, otherwise intellectual
| decline/underdevelopment of the future society is
| predetermined.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and
| socialise.
|
| Could this have died due to tech?
| red_admiral wrote:
| I don't think so, it started much earlier than that. Unless
| tech includes having a television in the living room.
|
| There was the Great Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 90s, and
| there were more and more places where you need a car to get
| anywhere. Urban crime, or at least the perception of it, also
| did its part. It started much earlier than the smartphone era
| in the US and the UK, but there's still parts of the Nordics
| and other places where kids go out to socialise and play in
| the forests or fields or whatever's around today.
|
| Tech on the one hand has given kids a new way to socialise,
| even if you can't meet up in person for whatever reason, you
| can still video call and play minecraft together. The other
| side of that is all the advertising and tracking and
| addiction-fuelling. The particular combination of always with
| you, always notifying you, and turning the addiction-
| generators up to 11 that you get on a smartphone seems to be
| a whole other level though.
|
| I wanted to make another point but I've got a ping because
| someone has posted on discord, sorry brb.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Not really, no.
|
| People have been talking about the "death of the third place"
| for a while, now.
| logifail wrote:
| > We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe.
|
| That sounds as though you believe spaces such as these no
| longer exist?
|
| (Full disclosure: have three kids, don't track their location,
| don't believe they are "unsafe" going to play outside)
| tgv wrote:
| > because ..., there is no longer any culture of letting kids
| go out and socialise
|
| Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That's no
| reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society
| and youth.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| > We can bring that back. I agree with all of your points. I
| am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I
| would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that
| my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have
| a low understanding of the impact social media is having on
| them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came
| home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a
| Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and
| she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees
| everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed
| but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of
| years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into
| messaging apps. I am terrified.
| tqi wrote:
| If the results of the study had gone the other way, would anyone
| have changed their minds about smartphone bans? Or would they
| have just pointed at the limitations of the study as reason to
| disregard the findings...
| madjam002 wrote:
| I find all of these bans quite interesting because when I was at
| school we would be figuring out how to circumvent the web filters
| and would be building apps to hide the games we had open on
| Miniclip when a teacher walked past.
|
| I think I kind of owe my software development career to these
| early days as that is what inspired me. We didn't have
| smartphones when I was at school and I guess things weren't as
| optimised to be so addictive but we did have Facebook and Bebo.
| tclancy wrote:
| Sure, but it's not like kids are missing out on computer
| options and not every kid is going to be a developer. Any kid
| who wants to play with technology today has much more of an
| opportunity than ever before (in middle and upper class
| districts in the US in my experience).
| rmbyrro wrote:
| such bans do work. one or a few will find ways to circumvent,
| but the vast majority will end up complying.
|
| our minds tend to fantasize a lot about our early days. our
| memories are flawed and what we remember now are full of gaps
| filled with fantasies that make us feel good.
| InkCanon wrote:
| When I have kids (or if I ever run a school somehow), I would
| give my kids hackable, terminal devices that could connect to
| the internet with work. Both sides are doing it suboptimally.
| The anti smart phone crowds are suppressing kids natural desire
| to look for learning and new experiences outside of taking
| exams. The smart phone crowds underestimate the power of these
| multi billion dollar addiction engines. The optimal solution is
| to work with the children's natural curiosity and provide them
| a runway to growth.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I agree, but as someone with kids, the problem is that it has
| to compete with the entire environment. It's not just
| screens, although that's the biggest distraction factor.
|
| There's a million more toys of every variety that are dirt
| cheap and that they will be given as gifts, or their friends
| will be given as gifts. And there's just such a huge amount
| of _actually great_ media to consume that's much more
| available, ie graphic novels and age appropriate books, way
| more higher quality kids show, etc etc. I'm not complaining,
| but a terminal environment is going to take a lot of careful
| planning in order to compete with an embarrassment of riches.
|
| I still think PICO-8 did a pretty good job of capturing this;
| given their licensing, though, I wish they had released an
| _actual_ console in addition to the fantasy console. It runs
| fine on a Pi Zero.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| I agree it's interesting. But back then (I'm 34) we only had
| desktop computers so the distraction time was limited.
|
| I remember being forced to take a typing class my senior year
| in HS, at which point I was already a very proficient typer. So
| I figured out how to hexedit the program save files and mark my
| exercises complete.
|
| I feel that the new era of phones and apps have two major
| drawbacks:
|
| 1. The always on distraction in your pocket and on your wrist.
|
| 2. The walled garden hardware and software that makes it nearly
| impossible to tinker and gain a deeper understanding of the
| magic behind the screen.
| MoreMoore wrote:
| I had a T9 dumb phone because that's all that was available.
| Smartphones didn't exist yet. There was no reason to be on
| your phone the whole time, at most I might be distracted
| because I'd be texting a crush during class. I wouldn't be
| scrolling through social media - it didn't exist yet or what
| did exist wasn't accessible by phone.
| amluto wrote:
| I think some of the difference may be the form factor.
|
| With traditional computers, the computer was in a specific
| place, and people would use a computer when they were at the
| computer. Then, when it was time to eat lunch or go to the
| bathroom or go to the next class, the computer was gone.
|
| On top of this, a real keyboard is _much_ faster for typing,
| which means that less time is consumed merely transcribing
| one's thoughts into text.
| biztos wrote:
| On the one hand, I think "Bad Thing banned for kids but the
| smart kids get around the ban" is a pretty good state of
| affairs.
|
| On the other hand, I fear that the "think of the children"
| crowd will attach legal jeopardy that will mostly fall on the
| smart kids, their parents, and indie developers.
| awfulneutral wrote:
| I think about this a lot because I was the same, I couldn't
| stop messing around with computers and I owe my career to it.
| But if I was a kid today I'd probably just get caught up in the
| easy distractions and not learn to program. It's a very
| different environment now.
| skirge wrote:
| Steve Jobs way (works if rich enough to live without smartphone)
| interludead wrote:
| It's a controlled environment, so there's probably a honeymoon
| effect.
| doug_durham wrote:
| It seems to me the issue is phone apps that are designed to
| exploit the limbic system. This is why you don't have slot
| machines in most localities. The phone itself is just a computer.
| Using the phone to write, help with homework, or communicate
| doesn't seem to be the problem. It's the addictive gambling-like
| apps (TikTok, Instagram, ...) that what generate compulsive and
| disruptive behavior.
| logifail wrote:
| > The phone itself is just a computer. Using the phone to
| write, help with homework, or communicate doesn't seem to be
| the problem.
|
| If you want children to learn to be able to write, you have to
| get them to do it themselves. Not with a computer, not with a
| phone, not with ChatGPT, with a piece of paper and a pen(cil).
|
| They may not like this(!)
| red_admiral wrote:
| > The phone itself is just a computer.
|
| But one with the special feature that's it's around you all the
| time.
|
| Even a computer in a child's bedroom is not around them when
| they're at school, going to/from school by whatever means of
| transport, eating meals outside their room, going to a
| diner/restaurant/cafe... with family (or friends), and many
| other activities.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Don't have kids, can someone explain what do you mean by banning
| phones in school? Do normally kids keep phones on them during
| class ? How can anyone study? If i had phone on me during my
| school days, I would just keep playing games all day.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Being able to write BASIC programs and play games on a TI83
| Graphing Calculator kept me sane through High School. That's not
| quite the same as a smartphone, as it has no communication
| features at all.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's like our society is in denial about this, finding creative
| ways not to reckon with an addiction. For the record: you'll be
| better off if you use your phone as little as possible.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I'd like to see this study done with activity trackers on the
| children to look at 1) changes in exercise 2) actual sleep time
| results.
|
| Not that I don't believe the results, but I we don't need to do
| self reported studies anymore, and having someone guess how much
| sleep they got is notoriously unreliable.
|
| Without the phones, did the children play outside more
| (exercise), and of course, did they do an activity like read in
| bed rather than scrolling - thereby removing the late hour
| dopamine hit.
| jonatron wrote:
| The kids were wearing smart watches for the study. Source: The
| TV show, Episode 1, about 9 minutes in.
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