Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 516 posts

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

#321

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

andrewla wrote: post #207
whycombinater wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say that the classic "Cow Clicker" game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker) is a strong counterpoint to what you're suggesting. Meant to be a satire with essentially zero gameplay, the author was surprised when it gained a dedicated following.

There is just something about the "Skinner box"-style of frequent microrewards in games that scratches an itch in the human psyche.

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

#322

Post by mcculley »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #312
mcculley wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people believe that the human mind is a blank slate and that culture defines humans more than any inherited neural architecture. I disagree with that conclusion, but it certainly is not “nobody”. One need look no further than the angry screeds in response to evolutionary psychology.

I suspect we will learn a lot from evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately it has a long history of "just so" stories, and being used to justify all sorts of racist and misogynist beliefs. It's hard to get rid of that kind of baggage once you've acquired it.

Not all of evolutionary psychology is what people call the "just so" stories. Any understanding that we are born with more than a blank slate that shapes our thinking is "evolutionary psychology". That is an unpleasant conclusion for those who want to believe that all undesirable human behavior is the fault of culture.

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

#323

Post by nybble41 »

ip26 wrote: post #146
jimejim wrote: post #57

This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable. I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early. Help them find good content. Have days…

This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable. it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen How about driving technology? Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16. There's plenty of precedent for young children being unable to safely & responsibly handle certain things. Was it Luddism that I wasn't allowed to operate a table saw wh…

> Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16.

Nonsense. It is commonplace for children to be introduced to driving gradually, from a young age. They are made familiar with it in an observer capacity from approximately the time they are born. Children typically learn to manage unpowered vehicles like tricycles and bicycles within the first few years of their lives—often as soon as they're physically capable of riding them. There exist low-powered electric (toy) vehicles specifically designed for use by young children; for those a few years older, bumper cars and go-karts are popular amusements. There are even places where one can go (with parental consent and supervision) to practice driving real vehicles on private property.

The one thing they aren't permitted before age 15 or 16 is legal permission to drive proper vehicles on public roads. However, adults who haven't passed the driving exams are subject to exactly the same restrictions. Those restrictions are in place not because it is felt that driving is harmful for children but rather because their lack of experience would pose a safety risk for other users of the roads.

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

#324

Post by derefr »

mindslight wrote: post #205

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…

Yep. The concept of "screen time" conflates such disparate things as "reading a book on an iPad" and "playing Candy Crush."

In this instance, the medium is not the message. Books, movies, etc. don't suddenly become more addictive just because they're on glowing rectangles. The glowing rectangles enable additional, potentially-addictive experiences that weren't possible without them—but you as a parent have complete ability to disable these experiences. A glowing rectangle that can "only" function as a library, encyclopedia, movie theatre, radio, and (if you like) chatroom, is still a useful possession, but likely not an addictive one.

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

#325

Post by woolvalley »

How is this effectively different from the cable TV, nintendo, home PCs and gameboy era of 20 years ago for kids?

Microtransactions? I don't think the existence of microtransactions is what makes it obviously worse. You could waste your entire childhood in front of screens back then too, and society quickly came to learn you should reduce screen time, despite the temptation of the TV babysitter. Those same lessons apply to the smartphone era of today.

F2P games, like the almost 10 year old farmvillie? That is a bit newer, and I do agree that has a problem. I don't think that is new although.

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

#326

Post by SolaceQuantum »

climber604 wrote: post #320

Not that long ago screen time meant a TV in the living room. Gaming meant a hardwired console on that same TV, or a computer in the computer room. When you weren't at home, there was not a screen. In today's World, the screen is in your pocket wherever you go. Children know this and the temptation is hard to resist when screen time is so accessible. Children see a large majority of adults engaged with their screens a…

From what I understand, people read yellow journalism and newspapers before phones on public transport. (Also, books were considered similar to phones for children nowadays.) Phones are definitely a whole new problem, but I don't think it's correct to describe it as fundamentally different behavior than the past in any way wrt adult asociality.

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

#327

Post by woolvalley »

mindslight wrote: post #205

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…

Like TV ads targeted to children 20 years ago to buy into the beanie baby craze?

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

#328

Post by samatman »

selimthegrim wrote: post #260
samatman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(waldorf kid here) while that is an obvious confound, the waldorf pedagogy strong encourages children not be exposed to any screen time at all. It goes further: even at the kindergarten level, all toys and costumes are natural materials, you won't find a single piece of plastic among items intended for a child's use. Even the crayons are made of beeswax.

Are they still making you memorize colors for days of the week? My ex gf tried to go out of a Waldorf program into engineering at CU Boulder and had no clue how to use a computer.

No doubt, it's absolutely soaked in weird Christian Theosophy. More likely to pick Montessori for my own youngins, wanted to provide some accurate info.

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

#329

Post by eddieplan9 »

The moment that I truly got the idea of "you are the product" is when my 8-year-old complained to me, "I had to watch 10 ads in order to get a gold coin to feed my fish."

I felt literally repulsive when my sweet kid is part of an army to bump up someone's ad views. I also felt truly ashamed as a parent and as a tech worker.

Unfortunately, the most common rule in my kid's circle is that kid can download any app as long as it's free.

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

#330

Post by derefr »

cirgue wrote: post #253
VectorLock wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

At least, bad if you let yourself be led by the nose by the platform's "recommendations."

If you're able to wrest control, you can have good experiences in sketchy apps. For example:

• Facebook with no Pages, just friends, sorted in chronological mode, and only subscribed to the particular friends that you actually want to know how they're doing.

• YouTube, but only for videos you find linked on some other place than YouTube; and then maybe subscribing to those videos' authors, and then directly checking your "latest updates" feed.

However, you can't really force kids to use these apps this way, and every step of these apps' workflows is trying to lead you out of this usage and back into their "idiomatic" recommendation-based one. So maybe better not to expose kids to the potential. (Or just give them an alternative interface without the drug-dealers-on-the-street-corners, e.g. YouTube videos discovered via an RSS reader, downloaded using youtube-dl, and loaded into Plex.)

Post reply on HN