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The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

nature.com

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

#221

Post by asdff »

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.

Gamers have their clans too and people can get kicked from that. You can get mic banned or worse too for being too flagrant. You can lose real money if microsoft bans you and you had a bunch of digital games for example. In sports its not like all the interactions are going to be moderated either. Sports are pretty notorious for talking crap about the opposition, but it can get much worse than just talking crap. I heard a lot of terrible racist things too during my time in high school sports just 10 years ago, from players and parents. There are a lot of nasty people out there and they perpetuate those views on their kids.

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

#222

Post by hackernewds »

isolli wrote: post #73
brightball wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo games on a console that don’t need an internet connection or include advertising. These have been the best combination for our kids where they have fun but aren’t addicted and can easily put them down. The moment games include advertising they optimize for all the wrong things. I won’t let my kids get free games on iPad, etc for this reason alone.

My daughter is transitioning from children's games to pre-teen games, and I can't find a single acceptable game on the tablet. Until now I hadn't realized how sensible Apple's rules around children's games had been, notably: no internet connection required, and no ads.

Seems good. But in theory, also monopolistic behavior. Through the same logic, they could mandate a certain political leaning as well

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

#223

Post by mrtksn »

hackernewds wrote: post #219
mrtksn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but not everyone has access to these all the time. When I was a kid, I used to live in a smaller town on the river Danube and I did my fair share of biking and fishing. Those are definitely great activities that everyone who can should do but watching TV and playing video games is also nice. The more options you have the luckier you are.

Disagree with this categorization, unless one lives in Chernobyl there is always something to do outdoors solo or with a party. Using your body as it was designed to be physically active is naturally good for the body and the mind

Come to Istanbul or any 5M-10M+ city. Anything outdoors is hours away for the most, so it's a special occasion and cannot be a daily activity. Those who have access, they use it. Most don't have access.

Europe tends to be on the better side of the things because the cities are not gargantuous. Amerikan suburbs thanks to the early driving age probably situated fine too but I hear that helicopter parenting is widespread in the USA, so maybe they have the opportunity but don't use it?

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

#224

Post by asdff »

tiahura wrote: post #102
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…

I agree. My 4 year old loves Fortnite. Reasoning through combat strategy, even in the age-inappropriate context of gun battles, exercises higher level thinking that clearly remains off when watching Ryan’s world. To be fair, the article does say watching videos had a positive effect as well.

The people handwringing about combat games have obviously never played them and their complaints reflect that. War is brutal, violence is terrible, and when you hear that there is some army game where you shoot people, you naturally think thats terrible, and I don't blame them for thinking that from their gut. But its nothing like the experience of being in an army and shooting people and dealing with that of course. You are playing capture the flag or something like that; team deathmatches are kinda like a basketball game racking up as much points as you can in the time period. No one actually dies, they respawn in five seconds and try again. Its basically just a game of electronic dodge ball or tag, or even basketball if you squint. campaign shooting games feel like those carnival shooting games with the flashing lights and point values for different targets, especially games like call of duty where its just march through the campaign and rack up points for different levels.

That's all they really are when you remove the theming and look at the actual mechanics of the game. the mechanics aren't screwed up or morally bankrupt or anything like that, they are the same games we've always played of racking up points or moving an object across a playing field or something like that. It's probably the reason why the fps formula is so successful, it plays almost like the games we already like kinda like basketball (with deathmatch) or football/soccer (with capture the flag or assault style gamemodes moving some object offensively or defending as a team).

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

#225

Post by slothtrop »

watwut wrote: post #214
slothtrop wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am concerned over yelling, swearing, mistreating younger siblings or other family member after playing. This is happening at home, presumably where it's the parent's place to discipline.

So? Yes, parent has power to punish the kid or yell at it. That power does not make parent happy about situation. If observed more then once, the parent will conclude exactly what you see in this thread.

So it's irrational to signal out gaming on the whole.

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

#226

Post by asdff »

swframe2 wrote: post #97

I think it is better to focus on getting kids to do creative projects. For example, parents should get them to write and illustrate a story once a month, or learn to play a music instrument, etc. If kids are doing interesting projects that change yearly and they work to improve their skills then the amount of time they spend on digital media will decrease and will not be a concern. Having kids do projects is super he…

The "get them to" part is the killer. I was easily frustrated as a kid and quit a lot of things in hindsight that I wish I stuck with. You never realize that time now is an investment for later, or that learning curves are different for everyone as a kid. I think that environment where you are in a cohort as a kid can be challenging too. If you see a few people in your class who are really good at something and you are struggling, that kills your confidence, and you will probably quit before actually putting in the work you need to get yourself to that same level and just assume it will always be impossible for you. As an adult now I see a lot of my peers still with this mentality and they drop new hobbies fast. Life is a slow march though and you shouldn't hold yourself to the standards of others, but that's a lifelong lesson that even 35 year olds are learning, and not something you can easily tell a 5 year old.

Of course, if you push too hard the other way, your kid may just hate the skill and drop it. I knew a lot of people who were forced into piano lessons, and got very good at it too. Many quit over the years due to that resentment once their parents gave them the choice, and today never play any music in adulthood. Such a shame.

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

#227

Post by asdff »

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…

I wonder what Johnson thinks about the decline of reading going on in parallel to the rise of TV viewership? It's true that old shows or movies might have had simpler and more tidy plots (not all of them of course), but I think even the most complicated modern shows aren't nearly so complicated as a basic novel. Case in point, anything adapted from print to tv or film has a lot of plot left out because there simply isn't enough time to convey that information given the lower information density of these forms of media vs the printed page. Before serialized TV was also serialized stories that could have very complicated subplots and other things going on. Then you have the newspaper itself with all of its complicated real world subplots; a lot more content certainly than what the talking heads on CNN can cover even with 24 hour news.

It's interesting with the internet too, even though there should be a lot more stories in the zeitgeist at once given its wide reach, sometimes due to its virality, one storyline is able to dominate everything at once and suck the air out of the room. Did we really need a dozen article about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in everything from Reuters to The Atlantic for seemingly two whole days? If you only got news from twitter that might consume your entire feed. If you got your news from the newspaper, that would at most just consume one article or two out of many others of pages of printed material. It would also be limited to probably one section of the many different sections of the paper all covering different news topics.

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

#228

Post by switchbak »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #46

When I was a kid I spent too much time on computers but it was mostly reading Wikipedia and googling programming questions, that kind of stuff. Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.

My early days were DOS mode-x experiments mainly in Turbo Pascal. I had a manual I printed out, and some kind of BBS usenet-like forum thing.

The docs were so sparse and the communities so small that it really was a much different experience than today. I have fond memories of it, but that might just be me looking back with rose colored glasses.

I would have killed for stack overflow though! But there is a sense of self directed mastery that you don't get when you are so much more familiar with how fast the bodies of knowledge are.

The closest I get to that these days is trying to hack code on a plane :)

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

#229

Post by dash2 »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #204
dash2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise. From twin studies, R2 of the "true" polygenic score on education is about 40%. The R2 of our best actual polygenic score is 4%. IIRC these guys aren't even using the education polygenic score. They're using the PGS for IQ. That's even noisier (because it was created using smaller samples, and you need biiig samples for this to work).

> Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise. Again, noisy data can still be useful. For instance, generate a perfect single-variable normal distribution, sample along the x-axis and perturb each point randomly in the y direction either up or down. Depending on the range of random values used to move the sampled points, you can still see the underlying distribution even though the…

Noisy data can be useful. What it can't do is be useful enough to say "we have controlled for X". There will be a large unmeasured component of genetic variation - probably about 90% of it - that controlling for the PGS doesn't capture. Given that, throwing a PGS into the regression is not worth the candle.

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

#230

Post by fullstop »

NateEag wrote: post #128
objektif wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even go to the bathroom in peace. How do you guys manage time for yourself??

I mostly don't. I get a few hours after they're in bed and before I go to bed in which to cram cleanup, catching up with my wife, and other bits of essential life maintenance. It does get easier as they age. Our youngest is three, so I have a while before the "hanging off my legs" phase is done, but I can remember the era of newborns, when I could be interrupted at any moment, and I couldn't count on an entire hour t…

You have about 1,000 weekends with your kids before they are legally adults. My children are mostly grown up now (18 and 14) and, despite the sleepless nights, I miss having them fall asleep in my arms and their absolute wonder of the world as infants and toddlers.

It's all over far too soon. Make the most of it!

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