Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

medrxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 348 posts

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#201

Post by dang »

throwaway_2009 wrote: post #11

People who support lockdowns aren't interested in facts; their viewpoints are shaped by marketing. It's been blindingly obvious from the moment we knew that coronavirus had a 1% IFR pre-vaccine that all of the restrictions have been net negative. We're now over 2% of our lives into this _by any definition_, which makes it utterly incontrovertible. That's why we have constant "reminders" everywhere; it's an attempt to…

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. Of course the topic is flammable to begin with, but what you did here stands out noticeably as more flamey than the rest of the thread.

Edit: you posted a whole bunch of flamewar comments to this thread. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again, regardless of what your views are or how right they are or how right you feel they are.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29615430.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#202

Post by wheelinsupial »

erhk wrote: post #7

Another outsize impact of overreaching quarantine restrictions. Why do we let politicians rather than epidemologists make these decisions?

Of the podcasts I’ve listened to with scientists and epidemiologists they all say that policy is not their domain. They say we are to provide advice within our domain and keep out of policy.

Possibly there is sampling bias with the podcasts I’m listening to and the people going on them.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#203

Post by erikerikson »

pyuser583 wrote: post #186
sirspacey wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible. She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad. Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime. I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings. A…

My daughter began an extremely unhealthy relationship with screens during COVID. She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic. She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history. She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends. Maybe iPads…

It's almost as if the way you use the tools is what matters.

I hope that works itself out for her.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#204

Post by IsThisYou »

kurthr wrote: post #90
gizmo385 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As evidenced by?

The rise and fall of rationality based words in English language (rose until 1980s and has plummeted since): https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118

Thanks for the link, that's really interesting.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#205

Post by evilduck »

bryan0 wrote: post #62
colordrops wrote: post #10

At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened. People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know this is not true.

> At this point in the pandemic we've should have come up with models that factor in the externalities of lockdown and factor that into policy decisions. That somehow still hasn't happened. What makes you think it hasn’t? I’m sure all lockdown decision makers are looking at these models along with models of hospital capacity. > People say "things are pretty much back to normal" but parents with kids in school know th…

My kids wear masks to school too. My oldest is probably not as heavily impacted by this but I feel like my younger child has been (started K in 2019). He doesn't really know what his friends look like, he doesn't get to see facial expressions of his teachers or peers as part of their emotions, he doesn't get to see the teacher enunciate words with their mouth, he's spent a lot of time learning virtually at a young age, he gets to hide his own reactions behind a mask. He's soft spoken and his participation in class is probably suppressed a little further and dampening him being challenged or as confident. Compared to my older child, there's less enriching extracurricular activities available for the last two years as well, clubs and PTA events and sports have all been impacted.

I have no way of quantifying any of this but there's just tons of little things that have the potential to be negative impacts to his long term success. Even if my kids cope, I worry about their peers and the worrying trends in academic test data compared to previous cohorts.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#206

Post by twoodfin »

mnd999 wrote: post #197
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bankrupt in both their pedagogy and their budgets The budget woes are a myth. The US spends more on education than most other countries in exchange for middle of the pack results comparable to less developed countries with far lower budgets. The main budgetary problem is bureaucratic. The schools get more than enough money, but the teachers aren't the ones who decide how to spend it, so a teacher who wants more sch…

So basically a deregulated, market based approach. This will work great in wealthy areas with good schools with educated and supportive parents.

The idea that poor parents don’t care about their kids’ success enough to want to choose what they perceive to be better schools is belied by the lengthy waiting lists for slots in charter or magnet schools and voucher programs.

What we have now is a market-based approach, where the price of admission to a top flight public school system is a $1M mortgage.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#207

Post by ben_w »

pyuser583 wrote: post #186
sirspacey wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: was intended as response to a reply to this. Appreciate the caution. We took a different approach. Unlimited screen time. Our daughter’s rate of learning is incredible. She willingly explores IRL play. No battles when we ask her to put down her iPad. Roblox and Minecraft are our shared playtime. I was homeschooled with no TV. My experience of her development is similar to what I experienced with my siblings. A…

My daughter began an extremely unhealthy relationship with screens during COVID. She watches YouTube for hours on end, usually 15 second meme videos that alternate between vacant and toxic. She’s obsessed with memes to the point where it’s impossible for her to hold a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a similar browsing history. She’s lost a shared common vocabulary with even her closed friends. Maybe iPads…

That is fascinating and surprising; I previously considered a Darmok-like language to be implausible, but it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re experiencing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

(Edit: my inner cynic just popped up the question “are you sure she’s not just being a stereotypical teenager?” even though you didn’t mention her age).

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#208

Post by dang »

cdubzzz wrote: post #97
vldchk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

> There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on…

> I know this is a poor form but fuck you.

Please don't do that here, regardless of how strong and legitimate your feelings are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#209

Post by peterbonney »

I think I say this every time I see a headline like this on HN, but I'll say it again: The past decade of social science research publication has proven that provocative-sounding results should be considered fraudulent until the underlying data has been published, and then (assuming the data passes muster) should be regarded with skepticism until independently replicated with a fresh data set.

Re: Children born in the pandemic have significantly reduced cognitive performance [pdf]

#210

Post by dang »

vldchk wrote: post #67
giantg2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what could be driving that trend.

I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents. Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.

> lazy parents

That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.

Post reply on HN