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The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

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Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#61

Post by ashark »

doubt_me wrote: post #53
toomuchtodo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing society's ills is not profitable. There is no VC money in it, there is no going public. The fixes required are long, unpaid slogs with little reward at the end other than you made someone's life better. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

What if we banned advertisements? How long would google, facebook or amazon last after that? All this tech is great. But we are kidding ourselves if we say we liked advertising or if it benefits anybody except the people putting them up. advertising is a literal cancer on society. If it was gone even in the simplest of forms so you aren't able to legally see advertising until you turn 21 years old. Or have our kids b…

I remember one of my professors who'd been behind the iron curtain back when there was an iron curtain saying the one thing the commies definitely got right was banning most advertising. Said when they crossed back to West Germany it was like every surface in every city was yelling at him.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#62

Post by vorotato »

Chaebixi wrote: post #54
vorotato wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also just going to say, if you had taken away my smartphone/internet in highschool I would have just dropped out, moved out, and probably would have been better for it. Most of the profitable skills I know are self-taught, from the internet. It's very bizarre to me that we're having this discussion on hnews.

> Also just going to say, if you had taken away my smartphone/internet in highschool "Smartphone" and "internet" are two separate categories, and the former is strongly associated variously low-value, deliberately-addicting behaviors. The internet still has valuable corners, but the action is now where the monitization's at. High school (and younger!) kids (generally) using their smartphones for stuff like getting st…

Do you have evidence for that claim? You know your parents said the same about you with your computer games. In reality, yes you played games, you also learned more. The truth is you used more of your time than they did and some of it was productive, and some of it wasn't. VSauce has a good episode about how every generation thinks this about the next, and there has never been any evidence for it being true about any of them.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#63

Post by craigsmansion »

Danihan wrote: post #10
_m8fo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to why you think not having a smartphone constitutes a punishment.

Because you could have the answer to nearly any question at your fingertips, and yet it's arbitrarily taken away? How is it not a punishment?

> Because you could have the answer to nearly any question at your fingertips, and yet it's arbitrarily taken away?

There's a person there, usually in the front. They have the answers in their head. It is their job to put those answers in your head. To transfer those answers you can ask them a question. It's what they're there for.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #27
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #4

I am terrified about giving smartphones to my kids. France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that. What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people? Playing fucking candy crush. We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not. So what can we do about it? I have no idea…

> Playing fucking candy crush. Well, that and replying to HN posts about digital distractions...

[deleted]

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#65

Post by ryandrake »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #45
leggomylibro wrote: post #20

This sort of thing worries me for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest one is that it seems like most kinds of successful endeavors require three things: 1. Persistence 2. The means to set aside time for that persistence. 3. Luck Number 2 is what most people tend to lack. Especially in our current climate, most people are mentally, physically, and financially exhausted by the ostensibly simple act of getting through a…

I think the difference between computer-based distractions (video games, smartphones) and those previous (television, newspapers, etc) is that the former is interactive, which leads one to feel as if they are doing something. Getting to the next level in a game or posting a comment or status that gets lots of likes and replies feels like work and reward, whereas one-way consumption doesn’t offer the same subconscious…

Engagement is a trap, it fools us into thinking we're doing something. Instead of evaluating what I'm doing in terms of vegetating vs. engagement, I find it helps to classify my activity into consuming vs. producing. Am I actually making or creating something, or am I passively consuming?

- Netflix: Consumption - Video Game: Consumption - Facebook: Consumption - Web Browsing: Consumption

(I give up, how do you make a list in HN-text?)

There are holes in this classification. I'd say posting to Facebook/HN/blogs is probably garbage activity too, but it's not entirely consumption. But thinking this way is better than making ourselves think we're accomplishing something by beating the next boss in the game.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#66

Post by vinniejames »

vorotato wrote: post #38
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #4

I am terrified about giving smartphones to my kids. France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that. What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people? Playing fucking candy crush. We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not. So what can we do about it? I have no idea…

Socrates felt the same way about books actually a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory. However the argument that kids shouldn't have books in school seems laughable. I would say they aren't wrong. Humans really can't remember entire books any more, but then they also don't need to.

Exactly this. Even the title is misleading as "damaging" the brain, certainly there are changes, but jumping to the conclusion they are damaging and not beneficial to the human race in the long run is near sighted.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#67

Post by IpV8 »

agumonkey wrote: post #51
IpV8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the massive progress in science, medical, renewable energy, etc. are pretty good problems to be solving. The silly games and facebooks are only a problem for those who choose to participate in them.

I stopped believing in progress personally. Progress doesn't help you in many important part of life. We're spending too much time on science, and often to fix economic / political errors of the past.

Interesting. Personally, I enjoy living in a world where my friends have overcome cancer, where I can spend < 1 hour a day focusing in food, and I am able to travel halfway around the world to experience machu picchu and be back by then next monday. At what point do you think we stopped productively progressing? Have you considered joining an Amish community?

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#68

Post by Chaebixi »

vorotato wrote: post #38
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #4

I am terrified about giving smartphones to my kids. France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that. What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people? Playing fucking candy crush. We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not. So what can we do about it? I have no idea…

Socrates felt the same way about books actually a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory. However the argument that kids shouldn't have books in school seems laughable. I would say they aren't wrong. Humans really can't remember entire books any more, but then they also don't need to.

> a lot of big thinkers in that era felt that writing and reading would lead to the degradation of the human memory.

And I'd hazard that they were right. However the degradation wasn't catastrophic because searching books is hard, so people still had to develop their memories.

Re: The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

#69

Post by pivotal »

cwyers wrote: post #39
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #4

I am terrified about giving smartphones to my kids. France's new rule (no smartphones in schools - no exceptions) is genius, and I applaud them for that. What is a supercomputer in your pocket, with access to a significant portion of the sum total of human knowledge, good for, for most people? Playing fucking candy crush. We wish that we, humans, were better, but we are not. So what can we do about it? I have no idea…

Is the infrastructure in place to support this? I feel like the removal of payphones in public places makes me hesitant to support a smartphone ban of any sort. Yes, they shouldn't be in the classroom, but if students have them in their locker... I remember in junior high, my sister and I had a rather busy extracurricular schedule, and my mother couldn't always be counted upon to remember when events let out. Payphon…

Banning smartphones doesn't preclude having dumb cell phones. My smartphone died last week and I thought long and hard about getting another one. Ultimately I don't have the willpower to totally resist, but these last few days without one have been enlightening.
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