I have a 6-year-old and worry about this myself. But I'll be honest, I grew up in front of an NES, TV, cartoons, Sega Genesis, nearly every waking hour. I'm not a perfect man, but I am a productive member of society. So in my mind, this is a little overblown.
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
301–310 of 516 posts
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#302>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…
> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.
A team of data scientists stand no chance against millions of years of adaptive evolution. Humans are an incredibly adaptive species who inculcates nearly anything into their lives with ease. Technology is no different.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the conclusion that a lot of people on HN seem to be reaching. Now how do we go about filtering out the 'bad screen' while allowing the 'good screen?'
I think the easiest heuristic is this: is the platform a delivery mechanism for advertising? If so, bad screen.
This makes sense to me. Does somebody profit by me spending more time here? They are going to tune it to make me spend as much time as possible here.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design. The notion of "nations" or "civilizatio…
Of course they weren't accurate, that's why I went to the library to learn more. But they transformed learning about history and geography from something tedious into something I would do on my own, in free time. Self-motivated learning, I think, is something special.
I'm not talking about the accuracy of the specific facts. I'm talking about the framing of the facts that impacts how you interpret/make sense of them.
>Self-motivated learning, I think, is something special.
In certain disciplines, like philosophy or history, where narrative and temporality matter a great deal, "self-motivated learning" often puts people at high risk for falling in with total cranks and walking away with deeply problematic biases.
The problem is that there is a lot of cool, fun stuff in these fields. But to actually understand them, there is also a fair bit of boring stuff about methodology and self-examination where you need to unlearn certain biases and confront a few types of of cognitive dissonance that we all have. Self-styled autodidacts have a tendency to spend a lot of time on the intellectual equivalent of candy and junk food and not enough on the "vegetables," so they come away with weird and unbalanced ideas about how the world works.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#305“’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.” –David Foster Wallace
Spot on. Where is that from?
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t characterize stack overflow as a delivery mechanism for ads in the same way that, say, YouTube is. Content creators on stack overflow aren’t there to make money by driving page views. (Rather, the mechanism driving page views is more utility than sensation)
I don't know how useful an epicycle in your model this is. Content creators on Facebook aren't there to make money by driving page views either, and yet I assume you wouldn't say that Facebook is "good", by the standard were discussing.
At the same time, SO is hardly optimizing for return visits to SO in the same way that I would assume that Facebook is optimizing their platform for return visits and engagement to Facebook.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#307>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…
> 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…
What you quoted does not at all warrant the response you offered, nor shame on the author.
The notion that human behavior can be manipulated and shaped by careful modulation of input is not remotely new, and it's developed considerably over many decades.
If you don't agree with or understand this, and would like sources, please say so and I'll gladly offer them when I'm at a keyboard.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTS games in particular were extremely fun for me, and I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking. I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me crin…
> I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking. You're kidding, right? Those RTS, particularly Starcraft, are an exercise in APS more than anything else. * For non-gamers, APS = actions per second. Being able to issue more commands than your opponent and "micro" (from the word micromanage) your units to tightly control their behavior are a large part of winning Starcraft…
I partially agree. You can achieve a decent rank solely through good mechanics (APM, mouse accuracy, etc). However, strategy is definitely important at the higher levels of competition.
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#309“’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.” –David Foster Wallace
Spot on. Where is that from?
The film "The End Of The Tour" - there's a transcript with that quote here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/end-tour-david-foster-wall...
Re: A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see two problems with how we view addiction: - Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits. - We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
> We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.
On the contrary, tabula rasa is one of the most sacred axioms of modern Progressivism.