Item — HN Reader

I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos.

I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction.

Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

7 comments

You should read what Socrates has to say about book addicts.

We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.

Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.

This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.

Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem.

I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect).

On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue.

But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.

Do you have a link to this. I’m interested in reading more?

Seeing this type of argument always bothers me. It's basically saying that, because people in the past were often overly critical of new technologies or trends, we can dismiss criticisms of new technologies or trends in general. Makes no sense.

I think it's less dismissing criticisms and more "just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad."

Other examples: cars vs horses, household appliances will make people lazy vs household robots will make peopl lazy, or SNL has really gone downhill (people have been saying that for decades, and it is indeed subjective but the generation who says it now thought it was peak in their youth, when the old people of their time were saying it sucked).

There may be some merit of truth and some valid criticisms in all of it. As other commenters have pointed out, books were a one-sided conversation, so Socrates was right in that sense, but sometimes it's necessary to have this one-sided conversation in order to have a fruitful multi-party conversation. And I think it's important for that to be understood -- some things are good for some things in some roles.

It's becoming very difficult to function in modern society without a smartphone. Smartphones have given us luxuries we couldn't even fathom in the 90s. Today I sent a spontaneous birthday gift to a friend in another state using Doordash. Twenty years ago that may not have even been possible.

I think it's important to understand the role of smartphones in our society and lives. It shouldn't replace real-life social interaction. It shouldn't be where we spend half our days looking at. We shouldn't believe the news that comes from our social feeds at face value (that transcends smartphones but you get my drift). But using it as a tool to get stuff done, that's invaluable.

Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by not just dampening real world interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is to start work).

We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world?

I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_.

Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond.

What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking

My kids are addicted to reading and I don't like it. Reading is great but not at the expense of staying up until 3am on a school night, not helping with basic household chores, not practicing music, not doing homework.

I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure, absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not hearing any directions given.

I think all of those downsides may be frustrating in the moment, but will turn out to be much less important, when viewed in the longer term.

I honestly think that parents enjoy depriving their kids of experiences because it's how they were raised.

Big deal they are staying up late. Let them sleep in on the weekend to make up the difference.

That's not how it works for sleep though.

> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.

I’m not sure if you have kids, but I’m not sure making the choice to ostracize your kids is one they’d thank you for later.

And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.

This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.

100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc.

It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.

The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends.

And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.

Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.

I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school.

I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.

There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.

Yes, the two kids in grade school who's parents wouldn't let them watch SpongeBob felt some exclusions from the lunch table discussion as well. The social aspect is extremely difficult to solve, and the app makers know this and accentuate it. They are shrewd businesspeople who's only goal is a functioning app that brings in more money than last year, hopefully on an exponential curve. This social exclusion aspect is why Facebook is still there, plodding along. They've effectively trapped the last groups of people there, and they raise the wall faster than the stragglers can climb. I'm currently trapped in snapchat as the only way to stay in touch with my old dnd group for when i come around. But those people are actually my best friends, so i speak to them more often, and i will be decompiling the APK and gutting the engagement shit with a rusty saw the moment i have time.

It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.

By good I mean having a small number of good friends rather than superficial relationships with large numbers of people. That should be a false dichotomy of course, but in reality it seems to often hold.

In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?

> And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents.

Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.

This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.

Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those bonds are broken when you have to quit.

The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit.

So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well.

It is a very complex issue to solve.

> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly

Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.

It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/

Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition (although not in nearly as fun a way).

The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them.

It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.

Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.

I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again

> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

Not sure.

I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.

That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired.

Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).

Have you watched the infinite scroll much? Because my direct experience says you're wrong. Probably you can't really recreated the teenage phone experience even if you wanted to. What you need is:

1) a large enough group of actual close friends to use some social media app, so that by deleting that app you are removing a large part of your social life

2) those apps to continuously add infinite scroll, ad driven, engagement trap shit into every single aspect of the entire app.

Imagine if your work messages came through tiktok and by pressing back you were instantly dropped into an infinite scroll feed curated to your interests. Or say, slack gets bought and becomes an ad driven company who's only metric is increased time in app. But! Then your work refuses to change apps! So as you watch the app slowly become an attention pit, you are completely prevented from escaping it.

I don't think a lot of you old fogies really understand what the apps are like these days, or what teenage social life is like without the apps.

The fact that you're claiming that it's not harder to read an uninteresting paragraph after watching an infinite feed tells me you, luckily, have the privilege of not being tethered to these apps. You have the privilege to exist in a world where your social life isn't governed by ad revenue.

Because i grew up at the very start of all this, and some of my friends still use some of the apps, and everything that's "common knowledge" about phones and attention spans is true. The phone itself is fine, but i do think that the infinite scroll is just about the most dangerous device on the planet, barring the obvious ones.

This just reads like a thread about preventing teenagers from starting smoking, being filled with older people saying "why would you do that? Quitting smoking isn't hard, i smoked a pack once and was fine. And besides, smoking a cigarette or two doesn't hurt anyone, I'm fine".

Yes I watch a lot of YouTube shorts. It's addictive and a waste of time but I don't find it affects my cognitive ability at all.

In fact it's mostly the other way around. I watch them when I'm too exhausted to do something productive (which is often unfortunately).

I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very different, even if somewhat connected.

I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function.

But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway.

Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.

I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.

They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.

I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.

Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why.

>Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?