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A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

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Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#91

Post by shlant »

nyghtly wrote: post #74
shlant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What makes Fortnite and Youtube videos worse than Nerf guns and library books?" Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling. Youtube…

YouTube Kids horrifies me. I feel like a curation approach to "kid-approved" programming would be much better method than YouTube Kids. And when you think about it, that's how traditional TV programming worked. Seems like a good model, given how much of an impact media has on child development.

highly recommend "Will You Be My Neighbor?" documentary for how to do TV for kids right from someone who really cares

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#92

Post by wlesieutre »

whatshisface wrote: post #72
wlesieutre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation. Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it. If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small…

> Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen. Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.

I'd like to keep the useful parts of a smartphone without optimizing the addictive parts. Too much to ask apparently.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#93

Post by msla »

trynumber9 wrote: post #3

> There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not. I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make game…

http://www.merrycoz.org/books/CONFESSN.xhtml

> At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments. I feel that I had a capacity for better things; but, under the ascendancy of this idle habit, it sunk into a fatal lethargy, from which neither shame nor ambition could awaken it. The drunkard, in the intervals of sobriety, feels most keenly the evils of intoxication, and, if self love allowed him to be candid, could a tale unfold of disease, of mental and bodily suffering, that would do more for the cause of temperance than all the societies in the world have ever accomplished. The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.

Reading novels will make your brains pour out your ears, kid.

Any new form of entertainment will meet resistance.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#94

Post by samatman »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #80
borkt wrote: post #64

I'd have to say whatever the waldorf schools are doing is working. My father-in-law's neighbor is an education PhD and her son has been in waldorf schools from the start. He is the most intelligent, wise, and confident kid I have possibly ever met, and he takes care of a wide range of animals at home (horses, chickens, alpaca, pig). He always seems fulfilled and is always excited to talk about what he is learning in…

Have you considered that the kind of parents that raise such children re the kind of kids to put them into waldorf schools, not that waldorf schools do something special.

(waldorf kid here) while that is an obvious confound, the waldorf pedagogy strong encourages children not be exposed to any screen time at all. It goes further: even at the kindergarten level, all toys and costumes are natural materials, you won't find a single piece of plastic among items intended for a child's use. Even the crayons are made of beeswax.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#95

Post by fhood »

Ok, come on. There is way too much "back in my day games weren't that bad" in this thread. Do you guys remember WoW? And Diablo?!?! Talk about a game designed to target addiction centers.

The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#96

Post by fhood »

adrianN wrote: post #22
remarkEon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTS games in particular were extremely fun for me, and I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking. I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me crin…

Games evolved from products that are sold once to a service that continuously extracts value from the customer. It's only natural that they try to be as addictive as possible when additional playing time means additional revenue.

Yeah, because games are really expensive to make. Fucking up a single time has been known to take out entire publishers. The issue is that many games simply can't break even at $60 a copy and so they have to look to other methods.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#97

Post by scarmig »

medobs41 wrote: post #79
danesparza wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've gotten me wondering: Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines? Is that a state-by-state regulation? A federal regulation? And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines? Thanks in advance for satisfying my curiosity.

Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines? I can answer for the US: Games aren’t subject to regulation because for the past few decades one party has made it their goal to destroy regulatory power to allow the wealthy to enrich themselves. One party in the US has been completely captured by billionaires and corporations. This started in the 1970s around the time the Koches founded the…

That's generic and not really convincing except to the already converted.

Getting into the concrete example of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, on the other hand...

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#98

Post by andrewla »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #21

>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said. >"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand." A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all kn…

> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.

This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.

No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.

> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact

Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#99

Post by fawak »

Cyph0n wrote: post #32
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your point, I got into programming because I modified the buy menus in counter-strike to my liking when I was a young teen and immediately got hooked by the idea that I could make my computer automate things for me. And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot. I remember my internet was so bad I had to add wait;wait;wait between issuing commands to t…

> And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot. Oh, you'd be surprised by how much strategy goes into CS at the highest levels of play.

> At the highest levels of play.

So not for 99.99% of the players.

Although it's not the same subject, this reminds me of a video by Duncan "Thoorin" Shields, a rather controversial and prominent eSports figure: "Gaming is a Waste of Time" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXfnfBk3BM)

In the video, he talks (among other things) about people justifying the time they spend on video games by the fact that some players win millions by playing the game. Sure some do, but the very vast majority of players don't, and using the 0.01% of players as an exemple is not a good argument in favour of video games.

Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

#100

Post by MildlySerious »

kartan wrote: post #55
Tehchops wrote: post #30

I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's on the screen. Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago. Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive. But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function l…

> They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine. I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines. Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use. The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of…

Can you recommend any literature on the topic of these "tricks"? If you're not in the industry, awareness is probably the best weapon against these practices.
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