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.)
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.
My wife is and was horrified by this. She was shuttled to other kids houses, and never allowed to go off on their own until deep into her teens.
Objectively kids are much much safer now, however they are not allowed freedom outside. Most of this is because of safety (where are they, are they being abused, have they been run over, are they in a gang, etc etc)
So _you_ as a parent need to entertain them
Giving your kid "the internet" shuts them up, and means you can do other things. However that comes with a bunch of risks that most parents aren't aware of.
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)
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.
They are a symptom of something else. For group chat, its missing out on socialising, Nobody wants that. How do you allow kids to socialise via mobile phone is that actual question there.
For video based stuff, _what_ are they being exposed to? how tightly does the selection algorithm push the viewer into certain categories? Who is making that media, and why?
Given that UK had the BBC to "inform and entertain", why are we outsourcing the entertain and leaving the "inform" to people sponsored by shady companies and malicious actors?
Could this have died due to tech?
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.
I mean, technology as such wasn't born together with the internet.
I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a suburb with forest and playground in walking distance, there were less and less kids outside, or for shorter duration.
TV, cable TV and video games just killed everything.
As people became "less local" as in, you didn't know the people in your street, it meant that unaccompanied kids could be more of a shit without their parent's finding out.
More old people getting or feeling threatened meant that something must be done. ASBOs were one thing, but also the feat that your kids might be mixed up in that sort of stuff, meant that free-range kids were the preserve of "seen to be failing" families
People have been talking about the "death of the third place" for a while, now.
that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative. feels positive to me, just not without there being negative aspects.
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.
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.
If your life turned out good, there's not much to gain from worrying about the past :)
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.
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.
The content I'm interested in banning is the content that I know (because I've literally worked for the companies making it and seen the sausage made in real time) is intentionally geared to drive user engagement and foster addiction.
Loot boxes.
Online gambling.
Microtransactions.
Constant app notifications.
Updates from your "friends" that your friends didn't actually make.
Advertising.
Content designed to drive fear of missing out.
Content designed to drive sales.
Content to influence behavior through fear, jealousy, and anger.
Endlessly scrolling feeds of tiktok, facebook, instagram, reddit, etc.
----
Content like unfiltered violence exists, but it doesn't have the same reach and hold as content that is relentlessly pushed because it makes someone money.
But the content making people money is fucking insidious, because it's "palatable" to most people at first glance, but it reduces my children to walking wallets. It plays on their brains during formative years in ways that are very close to straight up abuse.
It is like religious indoctrination, but for all the negative aspects of humanity, amped up with a solid understanding of statistics, human behavior, and brain chemistry - All to make my children (and myself and my peers, family, parents, society at large) into money making drones for a corporation.
I think that content is where I find banning appropriate. It's not about the message in that content. Kids should be free to learn material that interests them even if it's dark, depressing, violent, or sexual (ideally with an adult they can discuss it with).
Kids should not be free to be robbed in broad daylight, hooked on addictive drugs, or trained like monkeys in a skinner box to give companies money for dopamine.
I personally learned to program before widespread internet access, so know it’s not at all a requirement.
Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds.
Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.
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.
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.
We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.
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.
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.
Other examples: cars vs horses, household appliances will make people lazy vs household robots will make peopl lazy, or SNL has really gone downhill (people have been saying that for decades, and it is indeed subjective but the generation who says it now thought it was peak in their youth, when the old people of their time were saying it sucked).
There may be some merit of truth and some valid criticisms in all of it. As other commenters have pointed out, books were a one-sided conversation, so Socrates was right in that sense, but sometimes it's necessary to have this one-sided conversation in order to have a fruitful multi-party conversation. And I think it's important for that to be understood -- some things are good for some things in some roles.
It's becoming very difficult to function in modern society without a smartphone. Smartphones have given us luxuries we couldn't even fathom in the 90s. Today I sent a spontaneous birthday gift to a friend in another state using Doordash. Twenty years ago that may not have even been possible.
I think it's important to understand the role of smartphones in our society and lives. It shouldn't replace real-life social interaction. It shouldn't be where we spend half our days looking at. We shouldn't believe the news that comes from our social feeds at face value (that transcends smartphones but you get my drift). But using it as a tool to get stuff done, that's invaluable.
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
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.
And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
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.
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.
It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.
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?
Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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).
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".
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).
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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/S13826...
There is likely a way to test this hypothesis on human children in an ethical fashion.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
you dont believe the results you get, so you keep designing an collecting data from more experiments until you cant deny it anymore
The time is also the part of the conjecture.
>it's a determined effort to find specific results
does not make it so.
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?
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.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
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.
You are alleging this without evidence, and have no credibility to base your claims on.
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.
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.
Sleep is the real superpower.
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.
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.
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.
The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.
The email providers I use all require 2FA, but as long as I had paper backups of recovery codes for those I could probably use those to get back into most other accounts. No comment on whether I do have aforementioned paper backups, or whether I'm just relying on having a couple of devices with access to the codes, and then hopes, prayers and obsolete e-waste in drawers...
Of course, travelling makes the puzzle even harder, and that's when it's often even more important to not get locked out of accounts. I had intended to offer a suggestion to worry less, but instead I'm going to go away and think about this more myself.
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.
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.
As someone who has used The Internet™ 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Unless you start putting on dirty laundry. That’s probably worse.
That aside, people have depression, or no access to a shower, and so miss showering for weeks even. Amongst other reasons.
git commits are local things.
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.
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.
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.
Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to où 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So that is positive, but reading and playing games on a phone is negative?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a great signal I need to go to bed.
Hasn’t been a fight or a problem at all.
Before bed means before she starts getting ready for bed.
The last question I don’t know.
"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"
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.
It's only because most UK secondary schools already ban phone use in school time that (in context) it obviously means round-the-clock.
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.
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.
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.
Found another source that said n was 26
Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.
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.
I know, I'm guilty. Currently on "sarcasm rehab" for the sake of people around me and myself.
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.
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).
An adolescent way of thinking would be deriding sarcasm as beneath you intellectually.
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.
But you were confused by it and didn't understand the point I was trying to make?
In fairness, devmor's jab was rude and uncalled for. However responding to an accusation that you're immature by behaving childishly is really kind of weird.
> But you were confused by it and didn't understand the point I was trying to make?
The confusing part is that it doesn't seem to support your position. Devmor's claim was essentially that sarcasm as a rhetorical device can be abused but isn't inherently bad if used correctly. You then used sarcasm in what Devmor would probably characterize as an incorrect adolescent manner to prove the point that it is annoying. However everyone already agreed that adolescent sarcasm is annoying. Presumably your intent was to demonstrate via example why sarcasm is bad or in the words you quoted, to "[present] an argument under the reader's pretense that is obviously flawed". This didn't work because nobody claimed sarcasm was a universal good, only that in certain situations it could be used to good rhetorical affect. You made a flawed argument, but it wasn't using the pretense of the person you were responding to.
To summarize, its confusing because you are arguing against a strawman. Instead of skewering the parent's argument, which i presume was the intent, it instead just made it look like you don't understand the person you are responding to.
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".
We are at the "doctor smokes a cigarette while giving you your lung cancer diagnosis" point in history.
I.e. there needs to be consensus among parents.
What is definition of worse in context of mental health? Can free and open-source devices help or proprietary software is inevitable?
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...
According to whom?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.
In which case you can jump through all those hoops, or you can just go to work for 30 minutes and then buy it.
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.
Ideally I have a kale phone to note them
Because it’s too easy to go to social after I noted down my idea
As the person who posted about the option to lock selected apps - notes and voice recorder can be easily excluded from that set.
Neat idea
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
If someone makes this happen with custom rfid chip I can tape to my fridge I’ll be happy enough.
- 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?)
In my experience scientists respond pretty well.
https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/lh/#pu...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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(!)
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.
Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.
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.
> 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.
I wholly agree.
As for the personal experience, I am only 21 so I left high school (in europe) around 3 years ago. TikTok started to boom around 4 years ago. What I've noticed is that my peers who are just a few years younger than me use these apps much more. To the point where it's just unbearable to watch a movie with them because they open their phone up every minute just to get fed some random content. My sister who is 4 years younger than me is insecure to the point of having developed an eating disorder, and I know that social media played a big part in that. Both the insecurity and specifically the pressure to eat healthy.
The algorithms in these apps really play into your faults. If you engage with videos about healthy eating because you are insecure about your weight you will only get fed more of the same. And the creators on these platforms can make extremely toxic and harmful content.
I myself have tried to get TikTok to only feed me conspiracy theories and managed to do it in minutes. Some of my friends have succeeded in getting it to show self-harm content in a few minutes as well. I really find these platforms that give you absolutely no control over the content you're fed dangerous.
> the situation seems not much better for older people
I personally don't know many older people that really consume much phone content. My parents sure don't, neither does my older sister or my colleagues. For the most part anyway. So at least in my social circles the situation does seem better.
I even know a lot of people of my age that actively try to fight it. For instance by disabling video suggestions on YouTube.
Yeah, unfortunately I know some Millennials and Boomers like that too.
Anyway, you have an impressive perspective on this for a 21 year-old. These discussions tend to be among us old folks who grew up with dial-up Internet on the family desktop computer in the living room. I would not have guessed your age from your first comment.
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.
It's such an easy sell too. Hey parents, any objections if we prevent companies advertising to your kids? How about stopping them from tracking everything your kids do?
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.
I think its very challenging to come up with a solution of what part of it makes it addictive and how they can not do that.
Taking that logic we would need to remove almost all video games, social media and even online videos.
They are all marketed to keep people engaging with them.
Almost everything we create has been developed so that people engage with it, that's why we have marketing companies.
Either way, the same "they" does not have agency over both things. It makes sense to consider the thing you can actually do.
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.)
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
What is the point of a cell phone ban when it’s just replaced with a more capable device?
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 >£1bn 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.
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.
Some of the best sysadmins I've met are around academia because of the culture and they don't explode when being told their peers need to do better.
All I'll tell you is:
a) you're failing at stopping malicious internal actors you're simply fixing tick boxes
b) most school networks are a complete nightmare or worse laughable with next to no separation of resources (marking a drive as hidden on windows isn't secure)
c) maintaining an adult block isn't something to be proud of, there's services that do that for free at the perimeter they're called firewalls, deploy and forget, if that's not the case you are doing it wrong.
d) oh fudjing wow you wrote a script. This makes you a l33t sysadmin among your peers... Try taking to someone who deploys Linux at scale, this is Tuesday morning to them.
Stop blaming the teachers, and while we're at it, train them to not get fished by the smart kids...
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?
People are dependent on smartphones to live day to day, in a way that they were not on simple mobile phones.
Don't use your phone in class and it won't get confiscated. What's the problem?
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.
it would be OK in our case, but lots of kids live too far away to walk. Not everyone has a car.
it was also an example of how hard it is to do without it. My daughter is old enough not to need those rules and at this point (and at a sixth form college: a school that only takes kids 16+) I do not think such rules are needed.
For a more real example one parent told me of their low income family free travel to school that required a mobile app, but the school banned kids from even taking phones in.
No, these rules are needed like all rules in life. Don't just chop change and choose because 'you know better'. Society doesn't fundamentally function that way at your whym be you on top or the bottom. Obviously the real world bends to huge piles of cash but I doubt your kids are bribing the teachers here in this example...
So the low income family needs free travel via app. That's nonsense, no council in the UK is running something that increases the digital divide. They may offer it as a convenience via app but it's that. A CONVENIENCE. Especially where kids travel is involved, it's almost always a photographic travel id. Although there are a few that issue ones without photos.
Again if you break a rule you have your convenience taken away from you.
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.
My daughter likes to help and we as parents encourage her to, but for us it just means more work.
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.
Although many of us adults, myself included, could definitely use a strict break from the screens.
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.
We are ignoring the obvious which is that children's anxiety and depression is caused by the same things as adults.
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
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?
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.
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.
(~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
Only in public schools. At private schools, they are customers, and paradoxically the concomitant “entitlement” is not a bug, but a feature
(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)
Although you could make money in extra ways by networking with students for $300/hr SAT tutoring and such.
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.
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).
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.stbernards.org/about-us/faculty--staff
[2]: https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
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?article=1... (page 6)
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
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...
(Also note that the 20 years is only an optimistic lower bound.)
> Also note that the 20 years is only an optimistic lower bound.
Strongly agree.
I don't think teachers should control what kids do outside of school. Teachers aren't parents (or jailers).
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.
It can not be true for most of Asian countries with a really rich history of beating bad students.
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.
You verify your age using either passport, driver's license, digital ID etc.
There are plenty of services that provide this.
Sounds like socialism (/s)
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...
Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else
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...
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.
The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception, not the norm.
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.
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.
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.
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
this situation is also rehearsed - phone on silent, text only, safe words … hope you never need to be prepared for it
I.e. it sounds like you've terrified your children.
Why would you do that?
We scare children because we're scared, and somehow imagine that sharing that fear with them is helpful to anything but our own selfish fear of fear.
But I suggest that active shooter drills do more harm than good.
And I suggest that it's a mistake for parents to legitimize active shooter drills by giving their kids special silent-phone-text-me-safe-words instructions.
like the stories of companies at world trade center who took time to practice the extremely unlikely event of “airplane hit the building how do we get out” and then safely got out cause they knew what they needed to do, kids also need to be prepared as well. it is horrible thing kids have to go through in the US but pretending this is not happening I believe is not the way to approach it
The correct method of training humans to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion under dramatic circumstances does not involve frightening them.
Prepare for all sorts of emergency scenarios. Tornadoes, earthquakes, power outages, fires, police activity, bomb threats. Prepare for them appropriately. In some cases: assemble at a distance outside. In some cases: go to safe assigned locations. In some cases: shelter in place. Category X scenario: take action Y.
Don't tell kids that superbad monsters are coming to get you and it's your responsibility to hide and not die (but make sure to text mommy and daddy! phone on silent!!1!!1! safeword "cacao"!!) when these evil creatures with big magic weapons come to hunt you down and watch you twist and scream in pain and eat your liver and we're soo worried about you and just want you to be safe so please don't die gruesomely, we love you so sorry we can't protect you make sure to study hard and do your homework.
The foregoing is an only slightly editorialized version of the way some schools and some parents communicate ASD importance to their children. I've seen worse. It involved parents sobbing. I've seen better too, but not much better.
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.
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.
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.
Like certain types of food? Watching TV? Playing video games? Reading (fiction) books? Getting into relationships/making friends? Pretty much everything great in life can become an addiction.
If the claim is that social media is designed to be addictive, therefore we should ban it, then I would love someone being able to demonstrate that and that in this instance it's worse than usual. I want to see what "rules" they use to design something to be addictive, but I don't think this demonstration is ever going to happen, because social media isn't designed to be addictive - nobody knows how to do that. It's iteratively designed. They try stuff and make more of what works.
But we don't ban harmless tools that kids will need to learn to use in adult life.
And you can tell me all about the harms of social media, but social media can be accessed via computer also. Then you will tell me all about how computers are locked down to prevent access to social media at school. Effectively you will go on to describe reasonable controls that schools have decided they simply wont implement in this case.
The truth of the matter is technical literacy is in decline, schools have almost completely vacated the space. If teachers are mad at distracted students they can incorporate the distraction into the education (My secondary school did this with classes Excel in for basic financial maths, edutainment games, dedicated computer research lessons for otherwise book subjects) or choose to entirely stunt the kids by removing them.
Schools did this same shit to computers, they started by banning them, then incorporating them in lots of meaningful ways. If schools tried to ban laptops at school today we would be up in arms, but lots of "reasonable" people saw it as an easy quick win the last time around.
The trick here is to convince schools not to be 10 years behind but to keep up. If that means more funding in you jurisdiction, or higher fees, then do it.
I always remember a good friend of mine who was the first in his entire school to write an essay on his Apple II and print it off to hand in to the teacher. He got a zero for "cheating" and swore off computers until he was over 30. I imagine his experience would be familiar to kids caught "cheating" by using their pocket access to all of human knowledge to conduct research.
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.
IMO the objection is dumb regardless, but maybe that will help translate.
Both happen several times per week, neither happen several times per week at schools.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index....
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.
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.
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.
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.
> > *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.
Keep the phone, ditch social media apps/sites.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Having said that, I’m still an app dev (personal finance & budgeting) and I’m excited to onboard my kid into that world.
You can set the phone to only run an approved list of apps (like Phone and Messages, and that’s it, no App Store)
iOS controls have worked well enough so far but the school chromebooks have nada.
Screentime control are absolutely lackluster
A programmer keeps an axe on the wall next to the electric kettle.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Seems like your kids are being raised well.
I chuckled at this. The "carefully planning nerds" are being ruthlessly called out here, and I for one did not see it coming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
I’ve never heard anybody say this, but I think one of their goals is to teach appropriate use of phones.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(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.)
No iPads instead of books, only manual note-taking, regular blackboards/whiteboards instead of projectors, no calculators, and so on.
And of course, people who physically can't write need to have specialized curriculae. Just like we have them for deaf or dyslexic kids.
As a general rule, i am on team - if you need a calculator in math class then you aren't learning math.
It was what I think they now call a "manipulative" as way to teach place value, addition, and multiplication.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Not saying cars should have priority, but there you go
Ironically enough, one of the school transport systems used to run from here and during the covid lock downs, quite a lot of Police transport used to run in and out of there too.
Now I've really thought about it I need to start whining at whomever looks after the A37 around there. The worst bit is actually people crossing at the edge of Fiveways roundabout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes I wish there was a standardised framework for raising children but they're too unique and individual for something like that to work.
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.
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.
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 :)
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™. 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...
> I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router.
could lead people into thinking that a state of no distractions could be achieved with no external control. In my opinion, that is unrealistic and probably extremely rare. You will probably need to lock away or add some friction to accessing your phone.
As long as we have smartphones with zero-cost distractions, our reptile brain will need some external control and we can carefully design it.
So my general advice for anyone trying to reduce their doomscrolling time is: keep your environment clean and designed for it - move your phone away and activate do not disturb mode, use extensions to block websites, etc.
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.
Of course we can. It's quite enjoyable in the right circumstances.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)?
The mere thought of someone advising them would be literal hell.
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…
They are saying leaving by example is a good tool. They are not saying that every single rule must be symmetric
don’t think you are following or reading…
Hence, leading by example is a good tool.
You're the only one trying to apply to every single edge case imaginable.
No, you don't have to stop driving a car either just because you won't let your toddler take the wheel.
> On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban,
20 minutes seems like kind of a small impact.
An hour of extra rest does seem significant. Also averages without standard deviations are yucky.
> , and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.
An hour seems like kind of a big impact.
And who knows how good it is for the quality of that sleep
And the connection between sleep quality and early death is very well documented
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.
> 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.