The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#171

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:54 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #138

bamboozled wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember riding my bike through the rain and hitting puddles full speed and doing skids on wet grass and absolutely loving it. I also remember we used to go catch and observe certain insects and frogs that would only be seen in the rain. I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just bad weather can be an opportunity for children too. What about doing art? Lego ? Even cooking something fun? Recently my friends kids were going m…

Agree with you in general, but trampolines are pretty dangerous regardless of the weather and maybe not a great unsupervised activity.

[deleted]

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#172

Post by slothtrop » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

svnt wrote: post #170

slothtrop wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might as well lambast sports on the conceit that kids might swear and get angry for losing.

Not the same. Sports have refs, coaches, and parents. Yes it is possible to get a bad outcome in sports but there is no container in competitive online gaming. It is Lord of the Flies by design.

> no container in competitive online gaming.

Actually in competitive scenarios, e.g. tournaments, there are. Add to the fact ranked play is generally better behaved.

Speaking of parents, from my experience playing hockey, they are usually the worst offenders. Yelling at not just the refs, but the kids too. I've seen intimidation in more than one occasion.

At any rate, concern over the prospect of kids being "angry" is a weak take.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#173

Post by bigmadshoe » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #34

dash2 wrote: post #13

The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche. Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory jour…

The cost is no joke. ”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”

This is becoming very common in academia. The university I used to work for is beginning to require that all research is published in open access journals. Do you know the ludicrous fees universities pay to closed-access journals?

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#174

Post by dash2 » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

pocketsand wrote: post #152

dash2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. * There are tons of randomized controlled trials of policy measures (malaria bednets, minimum income). Many measure long-run outcomes. * Natural experiments can measure long-run effects. In economic history, sometimes that means centuries. * Many other designs are plausibly causal. The right instrumental variable, or a regression discontinuity design. In some cases, even a simple diff-in-diff with panel data. Thi…

The treatment here is regular social media use and video game playing. This not something where you can randomize people to treatment conditions, like you can with malaria. Likewise, tell me -- what would be a good instrument for estimating a causal effect of video game playing? What measure would plausibly affect intelligence only through video game playing? Where is there a natural experiment that allows for an RD…

No, my point is that bad research which conforms to people's priors should not be taken seriously.

There are many experiments on video game playing. Most of them are short run, obviously. But never underestimate researcher ingenuity. Here's a cute paper which uses as an instrument "did your roommate bring a video game to university"? Not beyond critique, but plausible: https://economics.uwo.ca/people/stinebrickner_docs/paper2.pd.... It's also relevant because the dependent variable is how much students study, and their resulting performance.

More to the point, if anyone seriously thinks video games will raise kids' IQ, and can persuade funders of it, they could simply give the treatment group an Xbox. That would be expensive - say $20K-ish - but much cheaper than the benefit of an extra IQ point or 2, over millions of children.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#175

Post by svnt » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

PKop wrote: post #18

Interesting points mentioned about genetic influence and heritability of intelligence.. "We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic dif…

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but do take their claims here with a huge grain of salt.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#176

Post by svnt » Tue, May 17, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

germinalphrase wrote: post #147

npilk wrote: post #50

Steven Johnson had an interesting take on this in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y... TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations. As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulati…

A counter argument (made by Alan Kay and others) is that the language complexity of what people read is reducing which is leading to a return to an oral culture rather than literate culture (to our collective detriment). My anecdotal experience as a high school English teacher leads me to say this feels true.

Who are the others? I would like to read more about this.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#177

Post by hypertele-Xii » Tue, May 17, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

bnralt wrote: post #160

rapind wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it. Video games, like all things, should not all be treated equal. I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investme…

In my experience, the vast majority of game play time, even with most complex games, is spent on relatively mindless repetitive behavior. This gets worse the more time is spent with a specific game. As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the…

> As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the opening moves).

Chess is a particularly bad example because you can memorize openings.

In Fischer random chess, the starting positions of the pieces are randomized, so even advanced players will agonize over the opening move.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#178

Post by hypertele-Xii » Tue, May 17, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #133

323 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing with toys does make kids smarter. It's not such a stretch to assume that video games have a benefit too.

The right kind of toys, yes... and the right kind of video games. There are toys, and games, that make you dumber. Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience. Case in point: Angry Birds. It used to be a very fun, silly, physics-based game. Now, it is infested with pay-to-unlock consumables that in some cases are required to get all three stars on a level (because you can't kn…

> Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience.

I think that falls within the purview of gambling.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#179

Post by mariocesar » Tue, May 17, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #5

I’ve tried to encourage my wife to choose video games over Disney+ when she needs to drop the kids in front of something, but she still has a strong resistance to the idea that games are better. To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies. I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your…

Games and Watching Videos are two different dopamine rewards systems, but both are still dopamine rewards systems. I encourage my kid for games more than watching youtube or doing anything less challenging. However, I still worry about when the stubbornness of leaving the games appear.

One rule I made to myself is simply don't encourage anything just for dopamine rewards. I try to mix things with effort, contemplation, or interaction. Doing something like this specific rule: No more than 1h playing Minecraft alone. If you want to keep playing, ask Dad, Mom, or your cousins to play together; the same for Watching videos.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#180

Post by micromacrofoot » Tue, May 17, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #129

bluefirebrand wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always gets discussed whenever gaming or screen time comes up. Kids below a certain age can't do this stuff on their own anymore in a lot of places. Your neighbors will call child protective services on you. This leads to kids being raised indoors, or only in enrolled events, because parents can't spend all of their time outdoors with the kid. Then when the kid is old enough to be outdoors on their own without s…

So let them call? Letting your children roam unattended is not child abuse, especially if the child is old enough to reasonably keep themselves safe.

I lived in a state that actually does consider it neglect, legally, if you let your Check your local laws, because having child protective services called on you is not a good time.