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School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

york.ac.uk

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Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#491

Post by api »

greentxt wrote: post #473
api wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call social media and other addictionware companies the “tobacco companies of the mind.” The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids. Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timeline…

Right, mainstream news has been doing this same clickbait for half century at least and it is the reason we allow it from social media. We're desensitized to it and actually seek it out. We live to suffer and be enraged, because in our minds democracy depends upon it.

At some point I think humanity is going to have to really declare war on addiction. I’ve been thinking about this for years.

It’s not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium for one example.

I’m all for free speech and I am against drug criminalization— as long as in both cases the stuff is not particularly addictive.

The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or control other people whether through substances, tech, or other media should be a crime. It could be considered a form of assault.

It would be a crime to implant a chip in someone while they slept that could be used to remotely regulate their emotions somehow, right? How is deliberate deployment of addiction different? Instead of implanting something you are exploiting what amounts to a CVE in the human brain. It’s a crime to break into your computer using a zero day, but it’s okay for me to hack your brain?

This is the “Butlerian Jihad” we need — not against technology but against addiction. “Thou shalt not exploit security vulnerabilities in the human mind.”

We know enough about the mechanisms of addiction that I think we can be reasonably objective about identifying it.

A first step might be to make it civilly actionable. If you can prove that someone deliberately worked to make their product addictive they can be the target of a class action lawsuit. You could, for example, sue social media companies for the hours of lost time resulting from their addictive designs.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#492

Post by thrw42A8N »

frde_me wrote: post #454
thrw42A8N wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is - it's under my control, if I didn't know how to do this I'd either accept the ads, pay, or not allow phone usage. There are options. I don't need the government to do that for me, I can decide myself. Here in Europe, phone is necessary for daily life - even as a kid. And it makes it so much easier, better - and interesting, if you teach your kids that. My kids use their phone like a Star Trek tricorder,…

I'm going to go to an extreme, but if we had solid research that said banning phones at school resulted in some extreme, lets say 50%, improvement in their ability to learn, would you support the ban of phones during school time? Would you expect the school to _not_ implement a policy that would benefit learning that much? What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles during class", would that infringe on your…

No, I wouldn't support that policy. That would be like banning paper because someone prints porn on it. Absurd.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#493

Post by Vegenoid »

graemep wrote: post #332
arrowsmith wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the policy at my school ~20 years ago. “Smartphones” didn’t exist, but mobile phones were ubiquitous and every kid owned one. But they weren’t allowed in the classroom, and if you were found to have one in the classroom (even if it was switched off in your pocket), it would immediately be confiscated and you wouldn’t get it back until at least the next day. Why would any school not have this policy? What pos…

Confiscation until the next day could cause all sorts of problems. For example my daughter needs a smartphone app for bus tickets. It would be a lot more expensive to buy a single ticket to get home and I suppose (especially with younger kids) its going to be difficult to ensure they have the money to get home - or the phone might be their main means of payment. People are dependent on smartphones to live day to day,…

I don’t know of any public transit that has a mobile app as the only way to prove purchase of some pass, they all have a physical card you can obtain. Maybe yours doesn’t, but I doubt it.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#494

Post by sourcepluck »

api wrote: post #413
washadjeffmad wrote: post #404

Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.

I call social media and other addictionware companies the “tobacco companies of the mind.” The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids. Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timeline…

I'll be using "tobacco companies of the mind"!

It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people dance around and explain away the situation.

It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a way out of the situation (barring some major technological or social shift, provoked by who knows what).

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#495

Post by EternalFury »

warner25 wrote: post #168
EternalFury wrote: post #145

My kids are phone drones. I failed to prevent it. I’ll never forgive myself.

That's heavy. If you're willing to share, I'm curious to hear more. Like when did you have kids, when did they get their hands on phones, how did it progress? My own kids are still too young for this to be an issue, and I'm encouraged to see more and more collective action to delay or restrict smartphones and social media, so I feel like we have a chance. I've said before that people who had kids 5-10 years before me…

Your estimate is dead on. My first was born in 2005 and my second in 2009. Social media and the early sexualization it brought were a problem for sure. But pretty much every interaction with these devices is messing with dopamine regulation.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#496

Post by gxs »

gmerc wrote: post #468
thrw42A8N wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any single anti-gun-regulation person who manufactures guns. Anyways. I am not app developer blah blah and I'm against this. Don't want your kids to be cash cows? Don't give them a credit card...?

Attention itself is being milked, it has very little to do with money on the frontline. We a/b test these products, genetically pruning them to maximum addictiveness ("time spent on platform") and peer pressure / virality and we're maximizing people's attention spent. Adults are unable to handle it, kids even less so. Even if you play Roblox for free, you're a) still critical to the developer (whale economics require…

Exactly, the fact that people think this comment has to do with explicit credit card transactions shows how unaware people are of all the other implications.

You said it best - the currency is eyeballs - even if you aren’t spending they want your attention without a single regard for the consequences.

One of those things that seems benign for any given app, but in aggregate has negative effects after hours/days/weeks/years of screen time and interactions with all the attention stealing content.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#497

Post by ben_hn »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #458
ben_hn wrote: post #437

It's not phones or tablets. It's the wrong doing apps / social netwrks / games. Same applies to friends: there are friend circles that bring only bad behaviors. We don't ban friendship because of that. Ban social network apps. Ban addictive games. Ban notifications and any other FOMO-triggering mechanisms. Don't ban phones.

OK, but anyone who makes this argument should at least put some effort into thinking about how to define what is a social network, and what is an addictive game. It’s not that you’re wrong, but you need to think about the execution and making sure that the criteria has a strong basis in principle that can be used to justify the decisions on what to ban. Otherwise you’re just suggesting the impossible

You're right. Defining the criteria for marking an app as harmful might not be straightforward or easy. But we're talking about the education and life of the children. These difficulties shouldn't a preventing factor. Maybe it's easier to allow services and apps one by one when there is a need only. Whatever that's not, let kids have a phone with internet and everything that comes along.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#498

Post by frde_me »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #492
frde_me wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go to an extreme, but if we had solid research that said banning phones at school resulted in some extreme, lets say 50%, improvement in their ability to learn, would you support the ban of phones during school time? Would you expect the school to _not_ implement a policy that would benefit learning that much? What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles during class", would that infringe on your…

No, I wouldn't support that policy. That would be like banning paper because someone prints porn on it. Absurd.

If I follow through what you said, paper has obvious positive impact in schools, or we can at least imagine that positive impact. And so banning paper would be very likely not to result in an improvement if studied. And like any smartphone ban, it _should_ be studied rigorously before implementing.

But lets say they do find that smart phones during class _are_ good, but just social media is bad, then it also sounds reasonable to me that a kids phone might be required to have some type of block on social media app during class time. Just like it sounds reasonable for a school to ban papers _with porn printed on them_ during class time. There's no issue besides on a practical level with getting more fine grained and isolating the impact.

Or do you also oppose that later, is your kid printing porn on paper and bringing it to school part of the personal freedom you want control over and which the school should not have to authority to ban?

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#499

Post by ryukoposting »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #404

Can we have smartphone threads where everyone discloses whether they're an app developer or have another conflict of interest? Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world. I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.

IME tech folks are, on average, more in-tune with the "keep kids away from screens" thing than the general population. I think we know enough about it to fear it.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#500

Post by njarboe »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #475
ben_hn wrote: post #437

It's not phones or tablets. It's the wrong doing apps / social netwrks / games. Same applies to friends: there are friend circles that bring only bad behaviors. We don't ban friendship because of that. Ban social network apps. Ban addictive games. Ban notifications and any other FOMO-triggering mechanisms. Don't ban phones.

Just ban advertising. Everything follows from the all out war on attention, and ads are its fuel.

I have a pretty libertarian steak, but I do sometimes think that banning advertising in general might be so beneficial for society that it would be worth taking the free speech hit. Not sure how in the hell you enforce it though. "What is an ad?", for example.
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