Indeed, four times greater than the absolute risk reduction of sever illness or death provided by the Covid vaccine (Nb: among adults), which was also mandated in many places
And the connection between sleep quality and early death is very well documented
It doesn't really make sense to compare the raw percentage of two completely different things. Especially when one is a percent change, and the other one is a percent risk.
There's a ton of health numbers that work out to 4%. Or 1%. Some of them have massive impacts on your life, and some of them are basically negligible.
20 mins is actually pretty big. The difference between chronically sleeping 20 minutes less than you need, and always getting the rest you need really does add up quite significantly, especially when it comes to learning and the ability to pay attention.
Forcing every adult to exercise 30 minutes a day would probably also have positive health outcomes. But would that be a good enough reason to introduce such a policy?
In US schools most students are forced to exercise about 30 minutes per day during gym class. I had this from at least 6th-10th grade, though maybe only a handful of days per week had any serious exercise, usually running or playing sports like soccer or basketball.
Not in any schools I attended or have had children in. You got gym maybe 1 to 2 times a week. In elementary school you were expected to run around during recess. In middle school and high school we had a proper gym class 3 days a week.
It would, but when you reach a certain age these institutions dont have power over you anymore to such an extent and when reintroduced to being as controlled as people were when they were back in school but in their adult lives at their older age they tend to freak out.
Yes 30 minutes of exercise a day and other ”law” like one preventing people from overeating to where they wouldn’t be able to walk anymore would be wildly positive but seeing as it’d impose on the freedom to be unhealthy it would not work.
It's been a thing in Japan off and on for a few decades at least resulting in fewer sick days. [1] I could see commercial gym's being upset if this were implemented. In the US and EU it would probably have to be voluntary at first with really good incentives to get people into it and would probably have to remain voluntary for one or two generations.
I think a harder challenge would be to get rid of all the bad foods and snacks. Facebook might be a good place to test removing bad foods given how many people live there and never leave. I can not even begin to imagine the incentives that would be required for people to adopt it.
> In the US and EU it would probably have to be voluntary at first with really good incentives to get people into it and would probably have to remain voluntary for one or two generations.
Health insurance companies already offer gym reimbursements. But that doesn't matter if you have a bad diet and bad sleep and spend too much time working or commuting, and don't feel well enough to benefit from a gym membership.
Heck, there's literally a free gym in the office building where I work, but few people use it because they are busy working during the work day.
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).
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.
Typical hn comment. Spin a good effect as no different than coming from another cause and then argue how it should not be made into a rule. False equivalence.
Say what you like about Noam Chomsky, but I recall him once saying that it is OK to cover children as their parent, presumably to build good habits. Thinking back about my childhood, I am sure that my parents did similar, to much benefit to me as an adult!
once you are adult you can claim “oh my freedom” and all that stuff… kids have no such luxury, it is on parents/teachers/community/policy/… to get them as best we can to adulthood and hence these two are not comparable. should we let kids snort coke during recess might be though (we don’t)
Banning something that you ban for adults as well is defensible. Insisting kids follow a standard of "healthy" that you won't apply to yourself smacks of hypocrisy and bullying.
Deliberately introducing it as a cultural change would probably significantly increase life satisfaction (through prolonging healthspan and lifespan both) and have positive effects on the economy. Cultures that value exercise (mainly Asian examples come to mind) benefit from all these things.
I feel like giving teachers and schools more freedoms to implement these things would be a great overall effect.
We've seen a large reduction of what teachers are able to do in the last few decades because the school districts have continuously pushed bad policies to protect them against liability and extra work. My parents were both in the school system and every year they would get more rules to protect the district by pushing more work onto them.
The school system has a lot of similarities to have Boeing has been run recently. The board and admins make all the decisions while the people who deliver the value get the short end of the stick.
Private school cohort is a minority, and those kids in the aggregate will do well because of their parents’ wealth, income, and time available. Private school teachers typically are compensated appropriately and empowered as well (as opposed to public teachers who are not). Managing expectations, but also realistic expectations.
(home/virtual school two kids under 10 in our family, my observations and perspective from interacting with both public and private schools and the parents there, ymmv)
The student-to-teacher ratio there is also wildly different. For example, it's 4:1 at one school in New York[1] vs. the 15:1 national average (it's 12:1 in New York)
I strongly agree that ratios are a component in student success. Regardless, if parents are not meeting their burden as stakeholders, student success is incredibly challenging. This applies across income strata.
TLDR “Do you value education and model that for your children?” (broadly speaking)
My apologies this was a long journey to the thesis.
Anecdotal but I went to a fancy NYC private school (on financial aid) and what I heard was the teachers actually got paid less than public school teachers + lacked the union protections and whatnot. But it was worth it for the nicer environment and dealing with motivated students with parental pressure behind them.
Although you could make money in extra ways by networking with students for $300/hr SAT tutoring and such.
That was true, I believe though that they also didn’t have to do as much certification, but were also often better pedigreed (e.g. the math teacher may not have done a teacher prep program or been certified, but held a masters degree in math from a prestigious university)
I think you are a little bit behind the times with current private/ charter schools. Charter School does not mean wealthy parents, it means non-public alternative that takes the public tax dollars and turns them private.
Private/ charter schools work off the fallacy that smaller school means better performance. They exploit the law of small numbers to support the fallacy. There will be one or two schools that do well while 1000 do not. Those that promote charter schools only talk about the two doing well as their example of why charter is good and pretend the other 1000 don't exist.
"Thinking, Fast and Slow", by Daniel Kahneman has a quick talk about this. Simple probability proves small / private schools are not good. Where are you more likely to find a mentor, in a school with 10 teachers or 200 teachers? Where are you more likely to find a friend, in a school with 50 or 5000 people? Where are you more likely to find a doctor, in a restaurant with 5 or 500 people? Where are you more likely to find a great walking stick, on the beach or in a forest?
There are less financial regulations and requirements for monetary rules with private than public. Those that run private schools exploit this for personal financial gain. "Education entrepreneurs" that can get a company car and use other tax evasive actions versus focusing on the education of the next generations.
I cannot speak to charter schools, I have no experience with them, only public and private (no vouchers accepted, some financial aid available depending on income).
> Where are you more likely to find a mentor, in a school with 10 teachers or 200 teachers? Where are you more likely to find a friend, in a school with 50 or 5000 people?
This is such nonsense. Beyond a certain (very low) number, the number of people at the school doesn't help you with those things, because you can only meet so many people. You have classes with a fixed number of teachers, and a fixed number of students in each class. Furthermore, it's usually roughly the same cohort in each class. So even at a school of 5000 people, you only productively meet a small fraction anyways. Besides that, the premise is seemingly that a good school is one where you can find a maximally good mentor and friend. But schools are for teaching things, so ensuring you can find a slightly better mentor or friend at best marginally improves the school as a school. If the charter school is better than a public school in some other dimension, then that will surely overshadow this miniscule effect.
You've seemingly borrowed an argument for larger cities and applied it to schools without understanding it. If I am lacking something in a small town, I either put up with it, or move to another town where I will surely lack something else. If I lack something at a school, I have the choice to switch schools to one where I am better provided for (assuming I'm given that option) or find something to supplement that lack outside of school (say a club, sports team, etc).
>You've seemingly borrowed an argument for larger cities and applied it to schools without understanding it.
I don't know that argument and never heard it.
Intellectual sorting will be applied in a real world.
By saying you have to meet all 200 teachers or 5000 students to find a mentor or friend would mean you have to try on all shoes, or cloths at a store to find the proper one(s). Your shoe, shirt, and pants size, with your acceptance of brands, greatly reduces the "you can try on only so many shoes, shirts, pants" argument. [0]
Is the student into robotics? Most likely only a STEM teacher would be into robotics, which reduces the number of teachers to meet to find a mentor. See a person wearing a shirt for a band you like, more passive intellectual filtering to find a friend and reduce the number of people to interaction with to find a friend. Into beat-boxing, perform at the school talent show and communicate to all 200 and 5000 students at once. You still might be the only one into beat-boxing though. More Intellectual filtering that go against "having to meet everyone to find a friend or mentor" argument.
Say you want to go out to a movie and there are 100 movie theaters in your area. Will you go to each one to find the right theater and movie? Or will you start sorting based on physical distance, known history, online checking of movies the theater is playing and times? Will you stop once you found something to go and see after viewing the 3rd theater or will you look and analyze all 100?
Dating apps, meet-up apps, social media channels or groups, even Hacker News, are all forms of Intellectual filtering, to assist in the "lacking something else" bonding.
Lets rephrase it. Say you want to have sex. Which would most likely help you reach that objective? Which has a high problematical outcome to achieve what you want, asking 10 people or asking 100 to have sex?
[0] I have abnormal size feet. As a kid, only found shoes that fit at stores with the larger product selection that sold only shoes. Had to try on countless number to find a single pair that fit. This feed my disdain for shoe shopping. As an adult, purchase them online because not even Nike sells my size, and I don't have to waste days trying multiple on.
> Is the student into robotics? Most likely only a STEM teacher would be into robotics, which reduces the number of teachers to meet to find a mentor. See a person wearing a shirt for a band you like, more passive intellectual filtering to find a friend and reduce the number of people to interaction with to find a friend. Into beat-boxing, perform at the school talent show and communicate to all 200 and 5000 students at once. You still might be the only one into beat-boxing though. More Intellectual filtering that go against "having to meet everyone to find a friend or mentor" argument.
I would say that running this "intellectual sorting" over schools themselves is far more productive then running it over individuals in a school. Suppose you find a really good friend at a school, who happens to not share any of your classes; or a mentor who happens to not teach any of your requirements. Going to a school in which most people have already passed a basic filter for compatibility would leave you far better off than running that filter over every person in a school. Like having a shoe store only for people with large feet.
except customer is not always right at private schools, the school makes the rules, you get to sign the agreement and then pay a bunch of money and the stfu. my kid goes to private school, no electronics of any kind are allowed. over the years many parents bitched about it which went as good as you can imagine - “there are many other options for your child’s education…”
absofuckinglutely NOT. parents are fucking idiots. you start asking parents shit and you end up with “oh this book should not be in the library.”
the way it should work (and it does in many private schools I scouted for my kid) is that school sets the rules, you sign the rulebook - end of the story. no discussion and 1,000,000% no parent involvement of ANY kind
If I could afford to send my kids to private school, I would happily pay a premium for a school with a strict anti-phone-policy. Not least because I’d want to find a place where the other parents are on the same side as me on this issue.
Ahh, my apologies. With regards to the 4 day week, parents are exposed to additional childcare costs I presume. The perils of having children in a macro that considers them a luxury good, and is unwilling to subsidize daycare nor pay teachers more. If you go into it knowing you’re going to suffer (cannot afford daycare, childcare, etc), that’s a choice.
> Also note that the 20 years is only an optimistic lower bound.
Blaming the “system” is easy but is it the whole picture?
How much of it is due to culture? Teachers in western countries are not as respected as teachers in other parts of the world. A few teachers abuse their authority and that results in outrage and lawsuits from parents, rightfully so.
I can imagine in many schools in the US, if a cellphone ban were to be implemented, there would be a large outcry from parents on how restrictive or overreaching that policy would be. Even if the net positives (as shown in the article) are proven to outweigh the pragmatic concerns (i.e I might need to be in communication with my child) why take the risk?
Not to be supporter of “the man” but it seems unfair to point the finger at a system that takes steps to preserve itself without also acknowledging the hostile environment in which it operates.
Parents have greater zeal in suing the school than they have in attending open board meetings.
In Ontario/Canada schools banned cell phones with much of any issue at all this year.
My friends in the US seems shocked at the fact that kids couldn't have a phone during class hours. When I asked why their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting.
Which just goes to show how much your environment affects your thinking. I've never once thought or even considered there could be a school shooting at a school here.
yep, my kids HS has a cloth rack hanging on the door to place phones in so the kids can grab them when a shooting is happening but doesn't have them during class
> their main issue was that if kids cell phones were in their lockers, how would they text their parents to say they were ok when their school had a shooting.
If the main purpose is just texting with their parents in case of emergency, they could get an old-fashioned pager for that. I heard that these devices are a pretty severe explosion hazard though.
According to my daughter, the Ontario ban had little effect on her high school. Before the ban, some teachers allowed phones, some didn't. After the ban, some teachers allow phones and some don't. Many teachers use internet resources in their classroom, and phones are how the students access those. There are Chromebooks available, but not enough for everybody, and they are in rough shape.
And the other daughter's middle school is still the same as before the ban. They previously had a ban stricter than the provincial government's mandate so nothing changed.
Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to organize their daily activities around that possibility, regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?
When you do active shooter drills during school three or four times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a skewed perspective on the real risk.
Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.
> 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.
they have phones in closets where kids are hiding parents can call to make sure their child is still breathing?!
I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly argument to make. every parent of a child in America worries every day something may happen and when it does time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time no parent should have to live through
I'm a parent and the last thing I'd want, if heaven forbid there was a school shooter, would be my kid (or any kid) talking on their cell phones or having the phones ringing and making noise that might cause the shooter to go investigate. A parent can literally do nothing about the situation over the phone.
there are active shooter drills in schools across the United States since like PK so you know, terrifying part is already done by government which encourages slaughter of children in schools (e.g. sandy hook) which then schools have to prepare for… then as a parent you have to try to explain this to your kid and best way to do that is to prepare some
more on a personal level
School shootings are real, and are legitimately frightening.
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.
I agree that they are real and frightening and given that the preparation for this unlikely event can be a difference between life and death.
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
No one said anything about pretending it's not happening.
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.
Yes, New York State is considering some form of cell phone restrictions in schools from the State level and there's substantial push back from parents who object that they need their kids to have a cell phone for safety reasons like a school shooting.
This source [0] says 81 school shootings in the US as of 12/6/24, so while not quite several times per week on average, it's within the margin of error.
As an American, I'm at a loss trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school.
Back in my day, all electronics had to stay in your locker except your calculator, including pagers, personal organizers and for the very few kids who were wealthy enough to have one, phones as well. This would be about the time that Motorola and Nokia were selling giant bricks that they called phones.
Edit: and no, school shootings had nothing to do with the change. We'd gone through Columbine not long before, and despite the media spamming everyone they're very rare even today.
Also as an American, my experience was that the majority of high school students didn't care about the rules on phones. I attended high school when Motorola Razr flip phones were the hot new technology, and kids used them in class all time. People learned how to do T9 texts without looking so they could slip their hand into a backpack or pocket during class. There were even ringtones high pitched enough that adults typically didn't hear them. All of this under the threat of phones being confiscated if caught.
I'm not defending the use of cell phones in class. But there have to be more effective ways to reduce their use among students rather than simply banning them.
And the vast majority of those are accidental, drive by, and "escalation of dispute" per your link. These are not the kinds of shootings that parents want kids to be texting about, these are run of the mill gang activity.
The mass violence shootings that you hear about on TV where anyone and everyone might be a victim are the exception, not the norm.
When you live in a city with lots of crime and there's a shooting in the parking lot of the school at one in the morning, it's not really something that needs an urgent text from the kids.
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.
this is a good thing I can talk to my kid about… there’s this Earth and on this Earth there is this Country where based on number of people that live there vast majority will not experience being gunned down in what should be 2nd safest place you can be. no other country on Earth has these issues, even ones that are 5x+ size of this one. But you know, statistically speaking you should technically be OK…
Please keep in mind, these lists are usually completely arbitrary and have very loose definitions of "school shootings", based around the usual theatrics of security and terror theater.
Some examples that have been on these lists in the past:
- A school resource officers firearm that accidentally went off when a child hugged around his waist. No injuries (there are other questions, but doesn't qualify in the same way)
- An empty .22 casing found in a random school parking lot, probably fell out of a car or got caught in a boot or similar.
- A gang fight at 1am on a Saturday near to school property.
- My personal favorite: The two schools closest to me that showed up on one of the lists (Everytown, I believe?) because the police were dealing with an active robbery situation about 1/2 mi away and they asked the schools to go into lockdown. Apparently "lockdown" immediately and only ever means schools shooting.
amen :) when you start weeding through thousands of things to find “silver lining” you have already lost (US has lost all sense of protecting our children a long time ago and it is nonsense like this that is poisoning people’s brains in defense of 2nd amendment (err gun lobbyists…)
> trying to figure out when phones started being allowed in school
I was a high school senior in 2003-2004, and my dad gave me a phone to use that year, and I think most of my classmates had one too, but I don't actually remember there being any problem or policy about it. I assume that's because phones were just phones at the time, and who were you going to call during class? I don't think I even sent or received a text message until a couple years later.
By 2011, when my wife started teaching in a public high school, it was the wild west with phones. The school policy gave her the authority to take them away during class, but then she was responsible for documenting and safekeeping them, so she didn't bother despite the constant distraction as kids openly looked at them during class.
The capabilities and market penetration grew so fast that I think most schools were just caught off guard, trying in vein to implement rules after the phones were already in every kid's hand.
I was around the same time as you, and I think the official rules for my school were simply that you can't use them in class. Exact repercussions left up to the individual teachers. Most didn't care unless it disrupted the class or was during a test, and a favorite for the class-disruption case was to answer the phone for the student and embarrass them.
My only issue is that its baffling to me that you would deprive kids of a platform that is going to be relatively omnipresent in their lives.
Like, a locked down school approved phone that cant load social apps makes sense (And yeah I am more than happy if the tooling is swiss cheese, because we need to inspire new pentesters somehow). But removing them entirely? That seems bonkers.
This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the idea that we shouldn't ban things by default.
The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?
Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.
We ban lot of things for kids that they have to cope with in adult life.
The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are few places where someone under 16 can buy it.
Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
We do ban lots of things that kids will have to cope with in adult life.
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.
>Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default.
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.
I didn't see anything about what the mechanism might be. Why would not having a smartphone in school affect sleep time, which I presume occurs at home?
As a guess maybe without a smartphone the students pay attention more in class, which leads to them completing homework faster, meaning less having to stay up late for that? I'm guessing UK schools do give homework, because Hogwarts gives homework and I presume JK Rowling modeled Hogwarts after real UK school practice.
Or maybe not having a smartphone directly improves mood, and people in a better mood have an easier time getting to sleep?
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.
> challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their smartphones completely for 21 days.
It was not a ban during school. It was complete phone abstinence. The result was that the kids got an entire additional hour of sleep! Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night.
I have a longstanding hunch that the whole “teenagers need more sleep” thing is greatly exaggerated and it’s just that teens just stay up too late because they’re extreme stimulation seekers. Phones have made things worse, but we’ve had TVs, etc for a long time.
I always laughed at the supposed benefit from moving high school start times an hour later with the claim that teens need more sleep. They'd need to move it three or four hours later; getting up at 8:00 instead of 7:00 is not a big difference when your body wants you to sleep for another three or four hours.
Was that based on anything? An hour of sleep is a big benefit. You’ll feel a big difference if you give yourself six instead of five hours of sleep, or seven instead of six. Sleeping too late in the day isn’t as high quality; sleep until 7am still is for most people. Students stay up late, but many aren’t regularly staying up past 12. Plus, we do have to compromise with teachers who’d like to have dinner.
I had a counselor or whatever once tell me I needed to “become” a morning person
Now I’m 40 and I still am more functional after 10am than any time before that. And I’ve worked jobs starting at 4am-6am for months but never quite got used to it
Yep 4am—1pm was my sleep schedule when I was in high school outside of school. During school it was 1am—5am during the winter due to sports conditioning and 1am-6:00am spring/fall. That was the earliest I could push my bedtime and still fall asleep.
I used to fall asleep standing in the shower. Do not miss it in the slightest. Every day is a good day to not be in high school.
Man, if my body was changing again so much that I was getting stretch marks, growing a few inches a quarter, and (for some) putting on 5s and 10s of pounds of muscle, fat, and bone, I'd imagine my metabolism would need sleep as well.
It’s well documented that need for sleep continuously declines with age. However what you are saying is likely also true, which combine to make kids really sleep deprived.
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.
Peoples sleep duration on average gradually and steadily declines from as much as 11-19 hours as an infant, down to 5-8 on average for 65+. There is no rapid sudden drop, and possibly no age where it stops going down either.
However, peoples individual need for sleep varies substantially on top of that, and can go up or down based on a lot of other factors. Medications, mental health, sleep apnea, diet, exercise, etc. can influence your need for sleep and how restful the sleep you get is.
If you're sleeping 12 hours and still feeling awful, there is likely something very wrong you need to look into. I'd go to a doctor and get a sleep study, but if nothing else you can get a logging pulse oximeter, and/or sleep tracker like an Oura ring. It is possible you are not really sleeping but having short waking events, and/or apnea events from sleep apnea that is keeping your sleep from being restful.
Teenagers do need more sleep. They also naturally tend toward later hours. This phenomenon even extends to similar developmental phases in some other species.
That said, the availability of artificial lighting, then the availability of TV, and now the availability of phones have made the problem exponentially worse by removing the natural boundaries that bracket out daytime hours.
I have friends and family who are teachers. As they tell, there’s an obvious bimodal distribution where some kids are going to bed at reasonable times and others are bragging about staying up to completely unreasonable hours. It’s a badge of honor for some to barely sleep at night.
Like most things it comes down to parental involvement. The gulf between students whose parents care and those who let their children do whatever they want is massive.
Yeah, but kids in general need more sleep. Are teenagers peculiar among other age groups? My hunch is that they’re not with respect to how much sleep they need, but are with respect to how much sleep they get.
I suppose that is because of social exclusion. If all the important things are coordinates online and in real-time, then those kids can't participate. Communicating with your peers is much harder when the peer's baseline is "I'll just write a chat message" and it would take considerably more effort to talk to the kid who doesn't have mobile internet access.
There are important distinctions to be made between categories such as being unaware of the cause of a problem (likely many of the children), aware but unable to redress it (most gambling addicts), and intentionally choosing to make a tradeoff for various circumstantial reasons (many but certainly not all developers working in C).
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".
I mean 's hard for an individual to go against what the rest of their peers are doing. The same applies to schoolkids as for programmers. There are a lot of costs to going against the crowd.
I think the implication is that there are parental authorities who can enforce this. Doesn't take much willpower when you've got people who will help you against your will!
We underestimate how much the average parent recognizes the problem. My peers had children and put a tablet in their children's hands almost immediately. Despite many working in tech, who I assumed knew about the growing concerns.
We are at the "doctor smokes a cigarette while giving you your lung cancer diagnosis" point in history.
I too have had this sense of superiority about the negative outcomes of other people's addictive behavior. It's easy to blame people for not having willpower. But (and I say this as a former casino owner, former bartender, and someone who worked on early Facebook games trying to maximize engagement), even intelligent people with better than average self control are no match for the sophistication of systems that have been designed, studied, and iterated upon for the sole purpose of breaking down human self control. Looking at myself not being a degenerate gambler, drinker or social media user, I suspect it's only because I have first hand experience being on the other side of the table in all those cases. When people do congratulate themselves for their own willpower, they tend to have other issues and addictions which they hide from public view, and/or they are recovering.
No one goes without being deceived in their lives. And teenagers with little experience are the easiest to deceive and to hook into addictive behaviors.
Some people think sarcasm makes for a smart and sophisticated joke.
In reality, it takes very little intelligence to say the opposite of what you mean. Once I reflected on it, I really think it’s such an adolescent way of thinking.
If you think you’re smart, then challenge yourself to make a great joke, instead of just saying !(thing).
That kind of sarcasm is not just saying the opposite of what you mean. It’s an attempt to compel the reader into understanding their own flawed rationale by presenting an argument under the reader’s pretense that is obviously flawed.
An adolescent way of thinking would be deriding sarcasm as beneath you intellectually.
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?
From where i am sitting it sounds like devmor implied you had "an adolescent way of thinking" and that offended you. To prove him wrong you essentially threw a tantrum.
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.
This was an interesting post. Thanks for making me question if sarcasm is actually a bad thing. I don’t agree off the bat but I’ve never seriously considered it.
it is a risky gamble IMHO.
(some) needy/vain people use it to 'prove' to themselves 'I am so close to person X that we understand each other so well that when I say the opposite they still understand me'. IE it's a bit like yanking a chain to prove it still holds.
Problems with that.. people get tired of people continuing to yank chains for no good reason (cry wolf). And other people are busy with their own lines of thought and lives. So instead of the intended (wow we understand each other/so close!), 25% (* ) of the time instead the receiver thinks "hmm he's probably in a bad mood today?!"
So, net effect is instead often to be viewed as grumpy moody.
Famously, kids don't parse sarcasm well, neither at them or others. My grandfather, who was,
in retrospect,
actually rather cool, was viewed as semihostile by us kids, because he often phrased his terms of endearment sarcastically. Net result was that we thought he didn't like us much, merely tolerated us. That is what macho sarcasm got him.
Now I am his age, with similarly bad habits. I guess my kids will end up sarcastic too.
( * *) A number I scientifically arrived at by pulling it directly from my posterior.
On the other hand, my sarcastic post got much more upvotes than my normal posts do (currently at 55 pts). Obviously fake internet points is not the same thing as a good post. Many upvoted things don't deserve to be and vice versa. However it is certainly a mixed signal here.
That's not always a bad thing, especially when it's about things like "let's do this or read about that" instead of sleeping at a fixed hours. Might be a part of why night owls are more creative.
Look, I am guilty of this. "Maybe people should eat less instead of popping Ozempic", etc. I have been on both ends of being an absolute rock and an addicted mess, so I can understand both sides.
That said - one has to go through the initial hurdle of buying junk food, or getting a prescription for a drug instead of taking a hard look at their life style first.
Phones are different. THEY ARE ALWAYS THERE, so resisting falling back into negative habit loops is never-ending, hard work.
Not really comparable because these are 12 year old children.
Not only could the phones be put away at night, but universally available parental controls could be used to lock the phones at a specified time each night.
We do this. It is just part of parenting, like deciding the time of bedtime.
I found it unclear because the title of the article and the title of the TV show imply it's only during school, but it's only the second paragraph that it mentions "completely". It seems to contradict the opening sentences.
My rule of thumb: If the headline and the body contradict, always trust the body (or even better, the peer reviewed journal article).
Never trust headlines, they are optimised for clicks, not accuracy. It's also common for headlines to be written by someone other than the article body, someone who potentially only skimmed the article, and changed based on A/B testing.
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.
I did a project once where I put my phone away before bed (switched off and in another room) and kept it off for the first few hours of the day, along with my wifi router.
I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed" to turn them back on.
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.
Depends what you mean by 'get behind on' I guess? I'm a 'morning' showerer, because my hair looks insane before a shower, but if there's nothing to particularly make me need/want to look presentable (obviously I'm not properly dressed having not showered either) particularly early then yeah I can get behind on showering.
I find it hard to call something ‘get behind on’ if you have no ability to do it in the first place. Getting behind on something implies it is possible and you choose (conciously or unconciously) not to.
Presumably some of the other 1,000 things to be done.
On my procrastination list right now: replace bathroom faucet, replace bathroom fan, replace belt in car, clean out garage floor, dust servers in my rack, move rack to new location, decommission old server in rack, clean wood floor, clean oven, caulk around the bathtub, finish reading about 20 books I have only read halfway through... could go on and on.
It will not help you because bathroom fans may have different ways to disassemble them, car belts may have different bolts position etc. You either can work with electricity wires or not, no third option, and the difference is mostly comes from having read or not having read the book (every country has a different one). For me the list is so boring that it requires me to have a device yelling some podcasts while I am solving such a mind-numbing issues.
> You either can work with electricity wires or not, no third option
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.
> 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.
It was a solo project involving mostly creative work: curriculum design, game design, programming, writing tutorials.
I found myself missing Google for language and API related questions frequently, so I used DevDocs, a website that can also "install" itself in the browser to work offline. For the stuff I couldn't find there, I just made a note to Google it after lunch and worked around it or switched tasks.
Note that this was before LLMs got good at programming / saying mostly true things, so there was no loss from not having access to them. Recently I've been experimenting with local LLMs, though they're not quite there yet (the ones I can run at least), and they're already fun enough to be distracting!
Yeah so the smartphones and socials can be difficult addictions to shake, but this is the flip side of it: when you do put them aside for an extended period of time you often see your productivity absolutely go through the roof.
I started sticking my phone in my bag or in another room during my afternoon work session and my productivity with that time doubled, in terms of actual output - tasks completed, lines of code written etc. and probably better ideas generated.
I started turning it off after dinner as well as running a simple script that blocks FB, Reddit etc. on my desktop - my "productivity" with my evening time also basically doubled, whether it was books read, games played, extra work done, time spent with people who matter, keeping my place cleaner, etc. just more life happening basically.
The more hooked you are, the more massive the benefit of quitting cold turkey. Once you see it a couple times the dynamic inverts and it gets harder to go back.
From personal experience, yeah of course if you rip the phones out of the kids' hands they're going to experience a variety of improvements... that's what happened when I ripped it out of my own hands.
I do find it interesting that this study saw little in cognitive improvements - it was only a 21 day study. I thin they are there but they're a long burn, reading books for instance is a skill that has returned to me but it's been very slow and gradual, I should probably lean even harder into turning off my phone and any short-form socials trash.
Damn, I should get my smartphone out of the bag and start using it, and develop a TikTok habit. Then I can put it away again, and my productivity will double!
Which is to say that I find this claim highly unlikely. You're very lucky to have such immense latent productivity that was just waiting for the smartphone dam to burst.
I noticed something similar. Productivity does go up if you don’t replace social media with other forms of entertainment. After a while one gets bored and starts doing more stuff, either work or hobbies
You can choose not to believe me if you want. Yes, turning the phone off doubled my productivity.
I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their time on their phone at work.
It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably goes into garbage content on the phone instead.
I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see the value in it.
I don’t get this comment. Double is common hyperbole, but like do you think tiktok habits don’t degrade other productivity? It’s a known phenomenon that smartphones kill boredom and boredom promotes things like sleeping and productivity.
You can waste time without a phone and you can do programming fairly productively on a phone (I lived without a laptop for 6 months, did everything in Termux!). But there's a right tool for every job, and the phone is designed to steal your soul (attention), designed to encourage mindless consumption, and interrupt you as often as possible.
This is part of a bigger principle I've noticed where I can rely on sheer willpower, or I can simply make a small change to my environment (e.g. move the phone to another room) and that's a much more efficient way to achieve the same result.
It's partly about reducing the Temptation, and partly about setting a strong intention / setting a strong message to yourself. If you're serious about getting some real work done, then why are you even looking at your phone?
Eventually you can get to the point where wasting time in any way starts to feel gross and you catch yourself more and more, but for most people it takes a bit of recalibration to get there.
I’m not a specialist but I think someone having in its hand the same device they do other activities on, may trigger some habits they have/had on that same device. That doesn’t refrain someone to be productive but not the easiest way.
Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc. all generated by content that was designed for mobile users. Books don't do this.
I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling, and many of which are more useful.
Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless.
Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)
Why would food at McDonalds be any nutritionally less valuable than food at home?! After all, food is food, and there is nothing stopping someone from having home cooked food at a McDonalds.
Recently, the writing-by-hand vs typing debate has been getting some more press, with people saying that pen and paper leads to better retention while note taking. Could reading have similar differences between methods?
Theoretically yes. In practice it is extremely difficult to say no to the short dopamine shots that a smart phone can deliver.
Perhaps, comparable how alcoholics struggle to drink moderately.
I am actually surprised that this is not self-evident, I figured everyone knew it, but upon reflection I suppose not.
So we have a bunch of data that points to these conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key insights
- We know that attention spans are just massively shorter on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web for example you always see higher bounce rates and shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement
- When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the gold standard is still reading from paper, and then handwriting notes about what you read
- It follows from the various above points that you're going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.
Doing challenging intellectual activity on a phone is possible, but it's a very small portion of what people actually do when they pick up said phone.
Phones are wonderful objects full of possibility, but in this context they're objects of mass distractions. That's 99.9% of their reality. Nothing wrong with normalising them as such.
Cocaine might be wonderfully productive for certain people, but that's not how it should be broadly discussed when we talk about its usage.
By do you ruminate negative thoughts? That’s my excuse for keeping my phone playing at night: I’m single, and despite being a successful professional and trying hard at dating when I was younger, my private life is full of bad experiences. I think about it and get angry. Youtube masks it.
Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to 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?
embrace them, just refuse to act on them. let the thoughts come in, let them stay, and eventually they go back out. you're left with boredom, which can then be filled with whatever productive things that you enjoy.
That’s the thing with mental health, sometimes you forget one of the methods to get rid of unhealthy habits, and they might be so simple. Let’s give it a try.
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.
Meditation helped me a lot. You can train yourself to notice when your mind is doing something unpleasant or unproductive. When you notice that, it typically just stops, and you wonder why you were even doing it in the first place.
I'd recommend (ironically) an app for that, but the important part is that you practice every day, even if only for a few minutes.
Alternatively, being too busy and/or social to spend any time thinking — I joked the other day that I had "backdoored" my way into enlightenment by simply having no time/energy to think.
I didnt create that situation on purpose, both aspects are due to poverty (working two jobs and living in shared accomodations) but they've both had powerful unexpected benefits, to the point where I'm not much looking forward to getting my own place and going back to being alone all the time again.
I’m sorry to hear that your past life experiences haunt you, but I’m also glad to hear that you’ve done well professionally for yourself despite that.
I can’t pretend to truly know your situation and realize you may have received similar advice already, but in case you haven’t or someone else reads this who feels similarly, here is some anyway.
Firstly, keep in mind this advice also applies inside the work place, for example think of having lost a client as someone who was largely responsible for preventing that from happening.
When something bad happens, we can have one of two mindsets about it, a victim mindset or alternatively a mindset of “how can I improve myself from this experience?”.
The key thing to understand is that the victim mindset is disempowering, that you’re resigning yourself to be helpless to stop it happening again, while the other mindset allows you to potentially be stronger and more capable for the future.
So when something bad happens, it’s necessary to reflect on what happened, and it’s okay to acknowledge that the circumstances were largely beyond your control, but you must be sure to focus on what _you_ can change or control to try be in a better position for the future.
And because the past can’t be changed (although not easily forgotten either), what you can change is what you choose to do about it going forward.
This change in mindset is often something that takes time to acquire, so don’t expect it to just happen, but the important thing is to constantly reflect with the goal of continuously moving towards achieving it and one day you may find you have.
I have correct answers to all of your questions. How do I know they are correct? Well first of all science: They’re repeatable and produce reliably the same result. Second: Attitude: People go all ways when I spell them out, deny them, be bad-faithed, attack me, or nag me on superficial properties; but one thing they don’t do is provide an argument against it.
It’s maybe usual to see people victimizing themselves in that society and that they’re so systematically wrong that “Take responsibility” is good advice.
However, I’m a white male who dwelled into work and got good results, and literal hate does exist against me.
Of course, some people who were talented early enough did succeed to build a balanced life. I didn’t learned to date early enough, and when 25 years old came, girls went systematically batshit crazy when they saw that I didn’t know how to handle sex, so that I reached 40 without a single positive experience.
It’s possible to recover with women when you get accepted in groups, but I’m a white male and I refuse to apologize for being white, because it’s been harassment all my life, and yes people are cunts, so no I won’t recover.
Eh, I'm a handholdless wizard who's been down in the dumps for years now, so trust me when I say I know what you're feeling (kind of). The trick is that yes, we need distraction from our shitty lives and it's very comfortable sinking into a zoomer routine to numb yourself BUT you can get the same level of distraction from saner occupations, as long as you still have some fire inside you (often in the form of spite and bitterness, which are much healthier than simple decay).
Lift heavy objects and acquire mass, lose yourself in classic nerd crap (old school fantasy/SF novels, obscure music, do the Advent of Code in Lisp/ML/Forth/Prolog), solo hiking, drive fast, etc... embrace the loneliness and become someone better than the rabble, choose the path of the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", not that of the brainrotten goblin!
I'm not saying that existential pain will cease, especially when being around people with a normal life full of joy that seems so unattainable, but it certainly makes you feel better in the long term.
Thank you, it’s true that hate and the idea of revenge kept me from committing suicide and were the path out from my darkest times. Maybe I’ve recovered more than I admit, because your vocabulary is what I used 3 years ago and I’m far from that now, just the addiction to Youtube remains, to covers the negative thoughts.
There is still advice that I’ll use from your comment, and once again I love the vocabulary “Lift heavy objects and acquire mass”, which is typical from the meme world. You basically remind me of Jordan Peterson’s advice to stand up and do something, as soon as a lighter period of depression strucks.
What worked for me is getting in really good physical shape and good physical conditioning.
I can remember constantly thinking how much life sucked, no matter how good it actually was. Slowly, the negative thoughts just went away as my physical conditioning improved.
It's possible that the discipline of psychology has something to offer you and you've simply seen a few bad psychologists. (There are plenty of them.)
If you ruminate a lot I would look into cognitive behavioral therapy and its variants and think about how their principles can be incorporated into your ruminations. The TLDR of CBT is it involves analyzing your negative thoughts critically, rationally and systematically in writing. Often when we do that the thoughts lose their emotional hold on us, even if some of them are true.
Avoiding may be better than ruminating, but processing is better than both. I spent way too much of my life thinking that ruminating was worthwhile on its own and eventually realized it is not unless you structure it narrowly and productively.
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.
I just had a text file "stuff to Google" and I Googled it later. There was always more work to do so I could either work around it or just do something else for a few hours and come back to it when I went back online.
Though most of the stuff was just documentation, so I just downloaded offline docs and reduced the need to Google stuff by an order of magnitude.
Of course, it's going to depend on what you're doing (I assume it works better for solo work) and what kind of resources are available.
Yeah, in my case the benefits were dramatic because I'm easily distracted and lose track of time. So I was like, I'm just going to eliminate all possible distractions. I found that very helpful.
Another effect was that I started to become somewhat more productive during times when I did have access to my phone, or rather, more reluctant to start wasting time even if the option was easily available to me.
On the other hand, I locked my phone in a rental car and it took a week for them to mail it back to me. I was surprised, but I found that it made very little difference. I did not feel like I had any more time than usual.
The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.
losing 2fa gives me anxiety. google auth is sync'ing now. it's a terrible idea from a security standpoint, though, which gives me even more anxiety... i guess i can't avoid security-related anxieties
Use an open source TOTP manager and sync your codes using something like Standard Notes, not your regular password manager. This gives nice redundancy and two layers of security while staying synced.
Me too, but it might help to find become clear on which of the accounts you have 2FA turned on for could be reset by having them send an email, and which you would be locked out of.
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.
How old are they and since what age do they have the phone? What constitutes as before bed and at what age do you think you'll lift the no tech restriction entirely?
I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago, and I have 50% more motivation, 50% more headspace to focus on things, and 50% better moods most days. The attention economy, especially in social media, is a plague.
It wasn't always this way. I did digital detoxes every few years for about two decades. For most of that time, there were always subtle positive impacts of switching off. But nowadays, the positive effects are not subtle at all. They are very significant.
I am impressed we let a few companies commodify and commercialize human attention and human connection to this degree. Humanity has been done a great disservice in both areas by them. One day, this period of mass harm will be a chapter in history books, I am now convinced.
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.
you can accomplish a whole lot of the same keeping the phone and deleting all social media apps and accounts (what I did). I still use my phone as a map and camera and many other things … my screentime went from 7+ hours to hardly ever over 40 minutes daily
that is actually not the focus. phones in it of themselves are not actually a problem, what we do with them is. you get phone companies to provide under-16 phones which have ability to call, text, use Map and limited browser capacity and not a single soul would complain about kids having phones on them. not a single soul might be a stretch as of course there’ll always be someone but you get my point…
That is actually the focus of my question and comment:
> > *I threw away my smartphone 4-ish months ago,*
> *What did you replace it with* (if you did edit: scratch that, I brain froze and was thinking of "did you replace it with a regular phone") ? Most accounts I read of people ditching their smartphones mentioned they started carrying an ultra light laptop or small candy bar computer (for instance). Basically increasing inconvenience to reduce usage.
Now if you could stop hijacking the thread and assuming I don't know smartphones can be tweaked that'd be cool.
Woah I never heard this before. Very novel. Is the theory here the grey scale is less visually stimulating compared to full colour? LOL, it almost makes me wonder if we need a Duplo mode that makes everything crap 8-bit colours and low-res to scare people away from their phones.
I keep coming back to the sites on my phone's browser. I have tried using various firewall applications to block network traffic. But it's hilariously easy to get around them.
You can actually disable the browser in a pretty serious way in iOS. First, ask your spouse/friend/colleague to set up parental controls on your phone and have them hold onto the code. Second, remove Safari through Content & Privacy Restrictions. Third, set up Downtime in whitelist mode to run all day. This way, Safari is disabled and an alternative browser cannot be installed from the App Store. If you want full control of your phone back, you'll need to ask your spouse/friend/colleague for the code – totally doable but now it's pretty difficult to get around the restrictions.
Something similar should exist for Android with regard to parental controls. Though for Android, I suppose you could also just uninstall/disable both the browser and the Play Store through adb.
Parental controls on Android are a bit more complicated and require another Google account. I'll take the latter route. I'll just install something like Firefox Focus, which clears browsing data on exit. It will help for one-off searches or an app that launches the browser for some process. I'm not sure if disabling the Play Store is a good idea. It might cause problems with updates. Right?
Otp and other types of mfa can be done on PC, too.
Mandatory apps (that I am aware of) should also be runnable on your PC using an Android emulation layer.
Mandatory ID and face scans can be done via webcam.
What I am more curious about is how they deal with navigation when traveling. A phone seems like a must-have whenever you are using public transport (e.g. a plane).
> 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 have a phone I set up specifically to disallow content consumption. It has a permanently on Downtime mode (iOS) with only a handful of apps whitelisted – mainly the ones you mentioned. The notifications are disabled, too. I don't have the parental controls passcode, I asked someone else to set it and hold on to it; so it's a lot of effort to bypass the content blocks.
I needed this to ween off social media, scrolling, mindless content consumption, otherwise it was just too convenient and easy to access all that to make the change.
Generally, this phone isn't a problem with regard to social media use or browsing. So it gets used only as a tool, and left in a drawer most of the time. My main phone is a dumbphone but with this second phone, I've not lost access to banking, work apps, etc.
This is slightly crazy, but also "extremely hard-core". I have real respect for your actions. That is some real self-control! You should write a blog post about it and/or do a YouTube documentary. Small joke: David Attenborough can narrate the video.
I really want to do this but there are so many things I need to do that now require a phone- key apps to access doors, concert tickets, etc. are no longer offering a non smartphone alternative.
Well, I think it was mainly the social media, notifications, and content consumption – not so much the smartphone itself. Dumping the smartphone was simply a "cold turkey" solution.
My company is situated across a main road from a college. There are a couple of permissive rights of way across our land to the road and quite a few students walk that way and also up the road.
This horror of a link is what Google Maps shows with Street View:
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?
I live far enough away from you that I think your English needs tuning up, and I couldn’t agree more.
In my college town the scooters around campus, ridden both on the roadway and on the sidewalk, add another element of risk to the “headphones are not helmets” crowd.
I mean, ok? What's the big deal? So you have to drive slowly and carefully and wait for people who are walking and might not be paying the best of attention?
I can see how that may be annoying but how many seconds/minutes does it add to your commute such that you would be so bothered about it?
Edit: And to clarify, I believe your post is incredibly tame and politely written. I've seen people get super furious over the slightest inconvenience - both in person and on the internet. Like they feel 1000% entitled to drive 5+mph over the speed limit and any interruption in that results in them laying on the horn and yelling obscenities.
An A road is typically a high-speed high-throughput road. Stopping to wait for someone to slowly cross can be dangerous. So you are stationary there and then some comes around the bend at 60mph not expecting a stopped car and wham.
Not saying cars should have priority, but there you go
Just maybe no one should be regarding coming round a blind corner at 60mph as any more sensible than crossing the road without looking ... especially given that the motorist is a lethal danger to others...
It is pretty awful. I have to turn right out of that weird ramp to return home. My mental rule of thumb is to only start the manoeuvre if there are no cars on the up hill lane - they are leaving a roundabout and also crossing over an unmarked pedestrian crossing. Lots of distractions without having to worry about a car appearing from the left.
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.
My kid's school got a lot of press for a smartphone ban. To be clear you could still have a phone, it was just taken if anyone saw it during school hours. If you got caught 3 times your parents had to come retrieve it ... that last part did wonders.
I don't know how the sleep part plays into it, my oldest of course wants his phone with him at all times (he is required to put it away before bedtime).
I wonder if the school's ban encouraged parents to set similar restrictions?
Our school has similar restriction, but then shoved Chromebooks in front of every kid and they use chat instead of text, watch videos, and play games all through class instead. When I’ve tried to find alternatives for my more distractible kids, the school acts like we’re putting them out.
What is the point of a cell phone ban when it’s just replaced with a more capable device?
If a school doesn’t have an IT policy of blocking YouTube and socials, then they are just inept. If the school is buying instructional material that requires that, then they are inept. If an instructional company is making anything requiring any of that, they are inept.
Yeah but most IT graduates working in a UK school on that salary are beyond inept in all honesty which is why do y many kids are able to find ways around the tills they use...
That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment.
I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum.
Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them.
This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£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.
You know how you get it right? Either on prem, offline everything, or explicit allow lists controlled by teachers for that specific period. Disable USB ports.
That’s what we moved to for one of our kids who couldn’t handle it. Except we have to control the access because the school won’t. It works.
Is it perfect? No. Google Docs is the worst due to embedding. But it beats whack-a-mole.
I’ve now had to do the management job of six teachers because they apparently don’t have the skill to deal with 30 kids with Swiss cheese restrictions. This, despite significant investments in software.
I guarantee you that this is not an uninformed comment. Exactly the opposite.
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...
At least for my kids their Chromebook traffic is all routed through the school (or the school's filter provider...) and through a web filter. It is updated regularly, presumably by the filter provider.
This was the policy at my school ~20 years ago. “Smartphones” didn’t exist, but mobile phones were ubiquitous and every kid owned one. But they weren’t allowed in the classroom, and if you were found to have one in the classroom (even if it was switched off in your pocket), it would immediately be confiscated and you wouldn’t get it back until at least the next day.
Why would any school not have this policy? What possible reason is there to allow phones in the classroom? How is this even a debate?
Confiscation until the next day could cause all sorts of problems. For example my daughter needs a smartphone app for bus tickets. It would be a lot more expensive to buy a single ticket to get home and I suppose (especially with younger kids) its going to be difficult to ensure they have the money to get home - or the phone might be their main means of payment.
People are dependent on smartphones to live day to day, in a way that they were not on simple mobile phones.
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.
Yes, that is called a punishment. And parents have to pick up if a kid misbehaves like that. That is a parental responsibility not a childs.
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.
I don’t know of any public transit that has a mobile app as the only way to prove purchase of some pass, they all have a physical card you can obtain. Maybe yours doesn’t, but I doubt it.
I bought something called brick which lets me lock some apps with a Bluetooth app. I have to walk to a different room and touch my phone to the little cube magneted to my fridge in order to unlock them. Just this extra friction has halved my screen time. No phone in bed no phone while I’m working and no phone on weekends while I’m bored.
Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.
Been seeing ads for a while, finally caved two weeks ago and bought one. I’ve been on vacation since it arrived but I’m honestly quite excited to get home tonight and set it up.
I've also been receiving ads for this and I gotten tell ya... Getting a testimonial from a HN'er on a random thread is a huge vote of confidence. I've been toying around with the idea of getting one.
I've also been using this and I think it's a great product. It's exactly as you describe it, just some extra friction makes a huge difference. I've even bought some for friends
I feel like we're getting closer to the moment where all high quality discussion will be locked behind invite only forums. (anyone can read, need an invite to write)
I can't really think of any other solution to the prevalence of bots as it gets easier and cheaper to write human seeming content
What's going to stop advertisers and propagandists from paying off those forum gatekeepers? Unless they're already wealthy or monks, they're going to be trivial to corrupt and the content will be even more effective!
As the person who wrote the original reply I agree, and can ensure you that I have no skin in promoting a product - my intention is to promote the outcome.
If someone makes this happen with custom rfid chip I can tape to my fridge I’ll be happy enough.
Fascinating. I'm wondering how the app manages to control notification behaviour & gatekeeps other apps. Obviously the APIs to do it must be there, just surprised Apple (of all ...) let's a 3rd party app do that..
For what it's worth, the product demands $50 for what is essentially a < $1.00 3D printed case and a < $1.00 NFC tag. You could probably (not endorsing it!) find the NFC code online and just dump it to a tag of your own.
I think you’re way off - I don’t know people making that much, but I do know several people who are well capable of that, and have literally embedded NFC tags with their own data in 3D printed things they’ve made. They’re making <$100K (pre-tax)
making more than $100 per hour, post tax, puts you somewhere at $400k+ income per year. outside of FAANG this is nearly impossible. even within it it's not so easy lately.
I bought it because it did not require a subscription and because it sounded like a smallish business - told me I had to wait a few days for it to be 3D printed.
I love the simplicity of it, the fact that it’s driven by fulfilling a need and not by greed.
Not affiliated in any way. Wish I had given this to myself years ago.
There are so many confounding variables here, the study doesn’t have a control group.
The study was made with kids from the same grade who “were convinced” to give up their phones, so basically it could be the study hypothesis is right but there’s a high change it could be anything else.
That's heavy. If you're willing to share, I'm curious to hear more. Like when did you have kids, when did they get their hands on phones, how did it progress?
My own kids are still too young for this to be an issue, and I'm encouraged to see more and more collective action to delay or restrict smartphones and social media, so I feel like we have a chance. I've said before that people who had kids 5-10 years before me (say, 2005-2010) seem to have suffered the worst of it, totally caught off guard by the smartphone and social media boom.
Your estimate is dead on. My first was born in 2005 and my second in 2009.
Social media and the early sexualization it brought were a problem for sure. But pretty much every interaction with these devices is messing with dopamine regulation.
Interesting. Thinking more now about why I picked 2005, I'm trying to decide if someone with a kid born in 2000 fared any better. I suppose that those kids were already teenagers when smartphones reached 50% market penetration, and giving smartphones to kids became normalized, and the "pivot to video" happened (really turning "social networks" into "social media" in my mind). I'm not sure if that was better or worse for them.
Again, it's a study that went all the way to monitor kids for 3 weeks, with sleep tracking, the school also helping etc. Minors are involved, so It must have been planned, ethically checked, reviewed and adjusted by experts.
And yet no control group. No report on what happened after the 3 weeks ( it should all go back to the similar levels once the ban is lifted, right ? Did it ?)
Not all studies can be perfect, but it feels almost intentional to go these lengths and omit such critical parts. Was this just some checkbox checking study to back a pre decided policy ?
There was a control group, according to the site of Stanway school. However the whole thing is very much a TV show, featuring a Big Brother presenter, the bassist from Busted, and a TV doctor who hopes it "kick-starts a national conversation about which aspects of technology use can HELP our children and which aspects are in fact HARMING them." No preconceived ideas there at all, right? But I can't find a paper, with details of the experiment, such as how participants were selected and how they were motivated.
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.
I couldn't find any mention of it, either on the Stanway site nor the York University which was the posted article.
Also the page on your link feels incredibly short, is there something that's not properly loading for me ? (at the same time I have a "2 minutes" reading time estimate on the header, so it can't be that long ?)
That's all I get:
> SWIPED: The School That Banned Smartphones is a landmark two-part documentary series, produced by BOLDPRINT Studios, which tackles the timely issue of the impact of smartphones on children’s behaviour.
Through a groundbreaking social experiment that challenges a group of teenagers to give up their smartphones for 21 days, SWIPED is exploring the impact of technology on mental health, social skills, and academic performance.
In a world increasingly dominated by screens, SWIPED dives into the heart of a bold experiment at The Stanway School. Led by celebrity couple Matt and Emma Willis, a group of Year 8 students are forced to confront the reality of life without their constant companions: smartphones.
For three weeks, these young participants willingly surrendered their devices, stepping into a digital detox. As they navigated this unfamiliar territory, cameras captured their evolving experiences, revealing surprising insights into the profound influence of technology on their lives.
Guided by experts from the University of York, the documentary delves into the science behind smartphone addiction, examining how these devices impact sleep patterns, attention spans, and social interactions. Through a series of tests and challenges, the students’ mental and emotional states are meticulously monitored, shedding light on the potential benefits of a technology-free existence.
SWIPED is more than just a documentary; it’s an invitation to rethink our relationship with technology and prioritise our mental, emotional, and social well-being.
> Interestingly, the research didn’t show significant improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialise.
Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.
yes they had a hypothesis. that’s how science works.
You left out the other benefits the study found. those benefits seem to be quite significant. In fact, I will go as far as to say that sleep has been well associated with student performance.
You remark comes off as disingenuous and not ready for serious review.
Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a determined effort to find specific results.
Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment might have been the wrong one, and that next time they have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture that such changes might happen later, which would require a different kind of test?
They didn't say "reality must be wrong". They said that their initial hypothesis (that significant changes would be observed after 21 days) is probably wrong, so they implicitly proposed a second hypothesis (that significant changes occur after e.g. a few months).
None of this is remotely contemptible.
Pretend you're an immortal alien conducting a study with the hypothesis, "humans are mortal". You observe that your subjects do not die after 21 days. Do you conclude that humans are immortal? (I hope not. It's much better to conclude that humans don't usually die after 21 days in this particular instance of extraterrestrial captivity.)
OK, fine, they didn't literally say "reality must be wrong", they just thought it, probably. The attitude stinks. And I say it is remotely contemptible. Perhaps I'd go as far as to say moderately contemptible.
It's a fair point about the aliens. They are presumably mortal themselves, they have expectations about lifespan. Something about the mind not being a blank slate, it's hypotheses all the way down, can't escape preconceived ideas. Sure. Except you can try. You can be more impartial than you otherwise might be, when you're aware that there's something to be partial about.
In the case of smartphone bans, the viewpoint is almost politicized, like whether you're down with the tech bros or think they're evil. Researchers should know that, and thus should be very coldly objective. Here they expect the degradation of mental function, why? That's not something well-understood like mortality. It's probably something there's a great wobbly mass of very questionable psychological research about - low attention in school and degraded working memory due to what they may well call "screentime" - and they've just gone along with it like it's established. Why is known evil thing not acting sufficiently evil to meet our narrative? Must do more research until true.
Another sketchy part of doing this research is the subtext that smartphones lower the mood entails therefore ban smartphones in schools. That isn't a science-based decision, it's a decision to trample on the kids' rights for their own good: science can't guide moral choices. But the only reason to scientifically establish the first part, the fact, is for the purpose of advocating a ban.
If you think children have a right to smartphones in school, then your priors are just really out of line with anyone who is actually concerned with the well being of children.
Not at all. Type II error is routinely the result of methodological flaws like insufficient sample size.
It would be asinine to study the effects of parachutes on survivability of jumping from airplanes, hypothesizing that they would help, but conclude that the "conjecture must be wrong" because the sample size was 2 and it failed to reach statistical significance, or because the airplane was on the ground.
Would you feel differently if the study period was only 1 day instead of 25?
Or maybe 1 hour?
Would it then be reasonable for them to speculate that the methodology might contribute to the failure to reject the null hypothesis?
they found it was invalid in the short term, for this particular study. the long term is still an open question. which is why they’re pointing that out.
saying “we thought this would happen, it didn’t, but maybe there’s just something to do with our study that meant we disnt see the result that confirms our hypothesis” is a perfectly valid conclusion.
I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.
I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos.
I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction.
Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.
This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.
100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc.
It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends.
And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.
Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.
This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.
I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school.
I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.
There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
Yes, the two kids in grade school who's parents wouldn't let them watch SpongeBob felt some exclusions from the lunch table discussion as well. The social aspect is extremely difficult to solve, and the app makers know this and accentuate it. They are shrewd businesspeople who's only goal is a functioning app that brings in more money than last year, hopefully on an exponential curve. This social exclusion aspect is why Facebook is still there, plodding along. They've effectively trapped the last groups of people there, and they raise the wall faster than the stragglers can climb. I'm currently trapped in snapchat as the only way to stay in touch with my old dnd group for when i come around. But those people are actually my best friends, so i speak to them more often, and i will be decompiling the APK and gutting the engagement shit with a rusty saw the moment i have time.
It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.
By good I mean having a small number of good friends rather than superficial relationships with large numbers of people. That should be a false dichotomy of course, but in reality it seems to often hold.
In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?
Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those bonds are broken when you have to quit.
The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit.
So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well.
> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.
Not sure.
I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.
I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very different, even if somewhat connected.
I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function.
But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway.
Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.
I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.
They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired.
Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).
Have you watched the infinite scroll much? Because my direct experience says you're wrong. Probably you can't really recreated the teenage phone experience even if you wanted to. What you need is:
1) a large enough group of actual close friends to use some social media app, so that by deleting that app you are removing a large part of your social life
2) those apps to continuously add infinite scroll, ad driven, engagement trap shit into every single aspect of the entire app.
Imagine if your work messages came through tiktok and by pressing back you were instantly dropped into an infinite scroll feed curated to your interests. Or say, slack gets bought and becomes an ad driven company who's only metric is increased time in app. But! Then your work refuses to change apps! So as you watch the app slowly become an attention pit, you are completely prevented from escaping it.
I don't think a lot of you old fogies really understand what the apps are like these days, or what teenage social life is like without the apps.
The fact that you're claiming that it's not harder to read an uninteresting paragraph after watching an infinite feed tells me you, luckily, have the privilege of not being tethered to these apps. You have the privilege to exist in a world where your social life isn't governed by ad revenue.
Because i grew up at the very start of all this, and some of my friends still use some of the apps, and everything that's "common knowledge" about phones and attention spans is true. The phone itself is fine, but i do think that the infinite scroll is just about the most dangerous device on the planet, barring the obvious ones.
This just reads like a thread about preventing teenagers from starting smoking, being filled with older people saying "why would you do that? Quitting smoking isn't hard, i smoked a pack once and was fine. And besides, smoking a cigarette or two doesn't hurt anyone, I'm fine".
Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.
This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem.
I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect).
On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue.
But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by not just dampening real world interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is to start work).
We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world?
I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_.
Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond.
What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking
My kids are addicted to reading and I don't like it. Reading is great but not at the expense of staying up until 3am on a school night, not helping with basic household chores, not practicing music, not doing homework.
I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure, absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not hearing any directions given.
Seeing this type of argument always bothers me. It's basically saying that, because people in the past were often overly critical of new technologies or trends, we can dismiss criticisms of new technologies or trends in general. Makes no sense.
I think it's less dismissing criticisms and more "just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad."
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.
Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why.
>Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly
Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.
It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.
Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.
Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition (although not in nearly as fun a way).
The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them.
It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again
I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.
Apart from whether the days are enough or not to wean off a long-standing addiction. Maybe a 3% boost in working memory has compounding effects over time as well.
You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in working memory long enough. You can't think about complex things if you don't have the working memory capacity.
If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.
Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.
>If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.
Or you might accumulate way less knowledge because you don't have a phone to get information from and are getting say 300% less information overall despite retaining 3% more of what you get.
This typically good science. You have hypothesis and test it, rather than doing an intervention and reporting every random thing that happened.
Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on cognitive development in the long run.
Yes but their conclusion is "well our hypothesis is probably still right, we just didn't look hard enough" rather than "maybe it doesn't have a significant effect".
You can look at that statement in a couple of different ways. Yes, experimental bias is one of them. The other is saying: we didn't see this effect, so we need to do longer term studies to see if it does exist.
Regardless, that statement is a good thing. It acknowledges a social bias towards the effect of smartphones. It doesn't give room for people to imply a result based upon that bias. On the surface, at least, it doesn't indicate that data was fudged to reach a particular result.
"Might mean" is a far cry from "our hypothesis is probably still right." This type of speculation is commonplace -- even expected -- in the discussion section of an article. Not much different than the lame duck "further research is needed to..."
I think you might have responded to the wrong comment. card_zero's reading comprehension appears to be fine. I'm not sure about yours though - the study didn't find any effect of phone use on cognition so why would time without a phone help reading comprehension?
By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
Someone realized it's not a good idea to hand a bunch of teens cameras, give them unlimited possibility to bully eachother anonymously and then force them to share a space for 8 hours every day, including changing clothes and showering for gym class. In hindsight it seems obvious.
I think that's the norm in UK secondaries too. My 11yo is allowed to take his phone to school for but policy is it stays switched off, in the locker, until the end of the school day.
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.
They did suggest a new experiment, one lasting longer than 21 days to test their hypothesis.
Hypothesis -> proposed experiment -> results -> questions evoked by results -> new hypothesis -> new proposed experiment
MOST importantly, they didn’t fake any results and went where the data took them. This is the kind of science that has been falling out of fashion for the last few decades in favor of researchers who work based on other principles.
They could have included the obvious (but probably unwanted) alternative hypothesis:
Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialize, or access to devices has a positive effect on attention offsetting the effects of sleep on attention.
It's probably unlikely but it is an obvious possibility.
So is the possibility that attention is an emergent genetic trait. There are many, many alternative explanations. You are lamenting the exclusion of your preferred alternative explanation, but the researchers need to choose one and look further along that branch.
The idea of open science is that other teams would be free to explore plausible alternative hypotheses. Some team might explore yours. Another might dig into my idea about the behavior’s relationship to genetics. And so on.
This is the method by which we move ourselves forward. And it’s easy to see how that effort is hampered by the practice of data tampering and other shenanigans. Which this team did not engage in, even when part of there hypothesis wasn’t supported by their data.
OR - crazy hypothesis - maybe they're familiar with the large amounts of research that already exists which shows that access to devices has a negative effect on attention. Just maybe.
Agree. I propose hypothesis here all the time and people will say "Show me the study that proves what you are saying!".
For instance. It maybe that the distracting quality of the phone is not the only thing providing better sleep and mood, but maybe it is the collective power of the EMF radiation that is disturbing the children's catecholamines.
"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."
Or even banning phones makes schools (where the experiment is probably being conducted) less transparent, allowing more freely to pressure subjects (intentionally or not) to ensure the "proper" result of the experiment.
That’s a very uncharitable interpretation of what they wrote, and goes outside of how what they wrote is supposed to be interpreted.
The researchers are not claiming that cognitive ability changes would definitely take longer than 21 days to appear, they’re suggesting that that is the next thing to test.
More importantly, I would wager: significantly less bullying, significantly less "have nots" for the kids that don't have the iPhone 42 HD MAX pro edition in solid gold, etc
Tangentially related, I recall being a teenager playing video games until 3am in my bedroom. As I grew up and got my own place, I eventually decided to have no TV in my bedroom and my sleep improved a huge amount ever since. I’m not perfect, I’ll sometimes go into a negative spiral playing chess until late and get more worked up, but once every few weeks/months is a marked improvement on every night!
Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.
There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop is something that is constantly getting in the way of my productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.
During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance at all (and probably improved it).
Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation, and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is depriving them of this sort of information and community). Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of skills and make people instead learn things much more inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e. studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in college).
With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to fix everyone's problems.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] thread> On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban,
20 minutes seems like kind of a small impact.
> , and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.
An hour seems like kind of a big impact.
An hour of extra rest does seem significant. Also averages without standard deviations are yucky.
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.
- 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?
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.
The mere thought of someone advising them would be literal hell.
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.
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).
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)?
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.
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)
[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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can not be true for most of Asian countries with a really rich history of beating bad students.
I don't think teachers should control what kids do outside of school. Teachers aren't parents (or jailers).
Sounds like socialism (/s)
No iPads instead of books, only manual note-taking, regular blackboards/whiteboards instead of projectors, no calculators, and so on.
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.
And of course, people who physically can't write need to have specialized curriculae. Just like we have them for deaf or dyslexic kids.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
that’s about 1,200 more than parents worry about anything else
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.
https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
According to whom?
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
git commits are local things.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a great signal I need to go to bed.
The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.
Old phone stays in a safe, and only pull it out to add new TOTP codes.
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.
Found another source that said n was 26
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.
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.
> > *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.
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.
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.
Keep the phone, ditch social media apps/sites.
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.
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.
https://www.dgbus.co.uk/tickets-fares/
Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.
You 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.
Sleep is the real superpower.
The time is also the part of the conjecture.
you dont believe the results you get, so you keep designing an collecting data from more experiments until you cant deny it anymore
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.
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?
>it's a determined effort to find specific results
does not make it so.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
Big deal they are staying up late. Let them sleep in on the weekend to make up the difference.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
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."
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.
Definitely something to consider if I ever become a parent.
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.