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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

#121

Post by briandear »

kara-1234 wrote: post #76
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…

Check out the light phone 2 or the KY-01L, both phone looks pretty awesome. the light phone 2 being just call, text, and the KY-01L having a web browser (though it looks so bad I probably wouldn't use it) Also both those phones have e-ink displays.

So the argument is that his phone is too good and he is sucked in? So a crappier phone is the answer? That’s like saying people drive too much so we should remove the air conditioner and radio.

It reminds me of the Colonel Sanders scene in So I Married an Ax Murderer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TPMS6tGOACo

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #40
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…

> I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue. 99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples conce…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by andrewla »

jobigoud wrote: post #112
andrewla wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

He never said these data scientists predicted the 6 year old brain and created the program accordingly. Just A/B testing and measuring what works best and what doesn't and progressively refining the product to match these findings is data science.

I'm already being downvoted, hopefully mostly for my tone rather than content, so by all rational means I should abandon this and go complain another day, but this really gets my goat.

A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".

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

#124

Post by clarkmoody »

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…

I disagree with your last point.

Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.

Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.

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

#125

Post by cf141q5325 »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #26
billfruit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia and YouTube can be huge timesinks as well, but hardly see much commentary as regards to FB and Instagram.

Reddit and hackernews too. Frankly when I was a kid there were oldschool forums I'd frequent all the time. I think this isn't a "kid" problem. I see just as many adults glued to their screens.

As adults however, we are old enough to decide for our self if we want to commit to bad habits. Kids are not attributed that judgment. There is a difference between restricting the diet of a child and restricting the diet of an adult.

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

#126

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

baybal2 wrote: post #102
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…

I remember myself struggling with Quake 3. It really felt to some extend hypnotic. Only after giving myself a proverbial slap on the face at around 2014 when I was 13 or so, and getting conscious of that being a problem, was I able vent Q3 out of my head.

I was addicted to video games into my 20s. Even now I have urges to fire up some MMO. It was only when I started working in UX design and researched human behavior that I understood how incredibly addictive video games are. Well designed video games go above and beyond to make you keep playing them. Even as a professional designer I frequently look to games to get ideas about how to hook visitors to spend more time in sites and apps. It's very ironic that the system that gamed me (pun intended) is now something I'm actively part of.

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

#127

Post by naravara »

nyghtly wrote: post #61

Here's some low hanging fruit to get us started: 1. Ban gambling in games. That is, if real money is involved in the transaction, then there should be no element of chance involved. If not that, at least properly enforce gambling laws to games given that gambling is illegal for children anyways. 2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it wi…

>2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.

So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating.

Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft.

The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.

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

#128

Post by Aeolun »

wlesieutre wrote: post #92
whatshisface wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I feel like this is a fairly weird argument. Bigger screens are not more addictive by themselves.

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

#129

Post by andrewla »

forgottenpass wrote: post #118
andrewla wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>This all happened by chance Nobody fell down the stairs and discovered that the tumble accidentally linked their KPIs to engagement metrics.

No -- a thousand people fell down the stairs, nine hundred and ninety nine of them found no link between their KPIs and engagement metrics, and the one that did thought that they figured out how the human brain works, instead of just realizing that they were successful for reasons that they likely will never understand or be able to replicate.

And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

danesparza wrote: post #60
kartan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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