A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by mitko » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #181

danesparza wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

Don't stop there... I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction. We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction. The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors t…

Can confirm... I am a 31 year old _data scientist_ who worked on these kind of algorithms, saw the metrics, and tweaked the algorithms to increase these metrics. I got addicted and it is harder to develop a healthy relationship with my phone/social media/youtube than it is with caffeine (I quit it!) or alcohol (I take a 1-2 month long break every year and rarely have more than 1 drink).

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

#202

Post by ConceptJunkie » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #127

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…

I've played mobile games where the option to pay just gets your through the game faster, and in my experience, if the game is any fun, why would I want to spend money to be able to play it less? But if people want that, I guess it's OK.

On the other hand, if the game requires endless grinding, and let's face it, a lot of these games are really just tedious work with a reward system built in, with little or no strategy or even decision making (beyond to play or not play), and you are literally paying to avoid drudgery. I've tried plenty of games where I soon realized it was nothing more than working towards a reward, and there was literally no "game" to it.

Well, if playing the game is drudgery, then it's not a good game. At this point, I would say the market should sort things out, but that doesn't appear to be working. People are clearly playing these games and getting hooked on them.

So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way.

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

#203

Post by wefarrell » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

skolos wrote: post #18

wefarrell wrote: post #11

There is always a tendency to blame the addiction on the substance, but it's usually symptomatic of something deeper. In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.

In past generations parents spent much less time with kids than now. Kids were mostly roaming streets. Now society frowns upon letting kids be outside nonsupervised, hence the substitution - screens indoors. Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

The content of that article makes a different claim than the headline. It's possible to spend time with a child without devoting time to child care, which is what the article specifically cites. This would be the case for family run farms, and up until very recently the majority of the world's population were farmers.

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

#204

Post by jjeaff » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #181

danesparza wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

Don't stop there... I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction. We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction. The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors t…

You can't control your dopamine uptake, but you can certainly control your actions. Especially when you recognize what is happening.

If I see myself spending too much time on my phone, for instance, I'll put it away for a while.

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

#205

Post by mindslight » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

Calling it "screen time" is missing the elephant in the room. The largest part of the problem is that the software we're directly interacting with has been designed by companies with interests directly contrary to ours!

Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued.

Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi have not been adversarily tuned to fire off the reward centers of our brains just enough to keep us returning for more. Whereas on the same exact screen, firefox/chromium are gateways to madness.

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

#206

Post by kopo » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #181

danesparza wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this." Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.

Don't stop there... I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction. We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction. The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors t…

Yuval Harari keeps saying this, that we live in a time where the systems know our weaknesses better then we know them ourselves.

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

#207

Post by andrewla » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

whycombinater wrote: post #193

andrewla wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm not a data scientist nor a psychologist nor an addiction expert nor ... But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time. In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights.…

> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor.

Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

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

#208

Post by TheMagicHorsey » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

The same people that buy organic peas also have a paranoia about screens. How unsurprising.

The article doesn't say there has been any peer-reviewed research to show a little screen time is harmful. It just says, oh, check it out, here is a grab bag of assholes, we picked out of a population of like 1 Million engineers, and THEY DONT LET THEIR KIDS USE SCREENS.

Well guess what. I was a video game engineer for 10 years. Now I work in a different area of tech. My wife works for a giant tech company too. We let our 2 year old watch cartoons on Netflix on Sunday mornings. She loves it. We think its cute, because we used to watch Sunday morning cartoons as kids ourselves. She's one of the most advanced kids in her daycare. She can recite the alphabet, count to ten, and speaks full sentences, and tells stories in class. The teachers say she is doing really well.

Whoopity doooo. So what if she knows how to use an iPad.

Please. Stop treating Facebook engineers like they are special snowflakes that know about everything because they wrote some javascript and html that runs a social networking website.

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

#209

Post by dxhdr » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

fhood wrote: post #95

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.

Older games like Diablo were not engineered to maximize Day 1 / 7 / 28 retention rates. All mobile games today optimize for those metrics.

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

#210

Post by wlesieutre » Fri, Oct 26, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

dwighttk wrote: post #174

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…

Perhaps I just don’t have smartphone addiction, but (if I do) there is something different between this “addiction” and others. There are no withdrawal symptoms for me. I feel the compulsion to pick it up and look at it, but if I don’t have my phone, after reaching for it in my pocket and not finding it a few times I just stop. I don’t feel a need to go find a phone or feel rotten because I don’t have one. And these…

You're right, I don't think it's as physically addictive as chemical compounds can be. But the time wasting is a very easy hole for me to fall into (he said, arguing with people in HN comments :P).

It's not the end of the world, if I end up having problems with it on my next bigger phone I'm more than capable of deleting the problematic apps. I've already done that with Facebook on my SE.

Even so, I'm also not excited about the ever climbing costs for new "upgrades" that I don't want. SE was a great size and had the top of the line camera from the 6s. Now if I want the smallest screen and the best camera, the price went from $400 to $1000. Welp.