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There are two separate issues: A. 1,000 ft view: drugs are bad. Both chemical drugs and electronic entertainment that is engineered to be addictive. Light weig

There are two separate issues: A. 1,000 ft view: drugs are bad. Both chemical drugs and electronic entertainment that is engineered to be addictive. Light weight drugs in small doses are less bad: 90s vs now. B. 50,000 ft view: the real problem. When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. In a study where the rats were placed in a healthy environment they chose food and water over drugs. We live and raise our children in the former. Humans evolved to be raised in an environment much closer to what is happening over in Germany with Forests kindergartens https://youtu.be/31eBV6ZTNDQ https://youtu.be/31eBV6ZTNDQ

crooked-v 8y ago
> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. In a study where the rats were placed in a healthy environment they chose food and water over drugs. I'm reminded of the mouse "utopia" experiment, and how people somehow find it surprising or insightful that animals left stuck in an overcrowded cage indefinitely with no entertainment and nothing to do gradually go insane.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Mostly overcrowded and unstructured, breaking nursing socialization behavior of mice via massive interruption of strangers walking through nests and huge noise. (See later experiment with "rooms" for mice.) The strain of mice used was relatively aggressive too. Of course, not quite applicable to humans or even apes.
clubm8 8y ago
Personally I think the issue is, and I struggled for a long time to articulate this... escape. I have always struggled with a cluster of issues... too much tv, too much internet, for a period in college binge drinking, overeating... the big "aha!" was that I was engaging in these behaviors to escape reality. We live in a unique time where if you don't like the reality you're in, you can step into another. Society has rightfully developed stigmas against other harmful behaviors. But the issue is a level deeper. For the first time in history, we can "escape" or "drop out" or whatever you wish to call it without chemicals. It's a powerful urge... after all, if you have a limited time on earth, and the world's information at your fingertips, it becomes extremely tempting to just tune out... everything.
- nitrogen 8y ago
  Books were an escape vehicle before TV, movies, and games.
  - lytedev 8y ago
    Sure, but doesn't it work pretty differently? With books, you're just given words and your brain has to fill in the gaps and actually do some work. With video games and movies, your brain is directly stimulated; shown what to see and hear.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      I know this is the common argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. when I was a kid, the graphics were quite primitive by today's standards, but playing the games at that age felt like stepping into a vivid other world. playing as an adult, I just see a bunch of geometry with shitty lighting while I run around clicking on HP sponges. I wouldn't say that video games are quite as stimulating as reading a good book, but I think we underestimate how much our imagination works to "fill in the gaps" to make games feel real and rewarding.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - dkersten 8y ago
        And how we used to think whatever the latest in graphics was, was oh so realistic and amazing! I played MUD’s for a few years when I was younger and in hindsight it was amazing: while the writing wasn’t typically as good as a book, you still filled in the world and characters with your imagination and it was both interactive and social. I still have some vivid memories of it that are as clear as if it had been a modern game or movie, despite that in reality I was reading text.
        bitexploder 8y ago
        Some MUDs back in the day had combat and skill systems as complex as any modern MMOs. They were the precursor to MMORPG.
brightball 8y ago
Some friends of mine and their girls moved to Germany for 2 years and talk non-stop about these schools. They say it’s the thing they miss the most.
ssivark 8y ago
Forest Kindergartens remind me of a movie I quite liked, which others might find interesting: Captain Fantastic (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
jungler 8y ago
The more I think about the "boredom is good" concept, the more I suspect it's flawed. Bored kids get into trouble, especially as they get older. By 18, a very bored kid left to chance will have found an unhealthy outlet like drinking or property theft. We have a lot of screens now. But it's what one sees and does with the screen that matters. There is an element of media as pollution in this, but it's contrasted against our notion of "the classics". We always end up with a youth that is a mixture of the misspent and the classics.
- mmmmpancakes 8y ago
  “By 18, a very bored kid left to chance will have found an unhealthy outlet like drinking or property theft.” Do you have some statistics to back up this claim, along with a comparison against teens who are not bored?
  - marcell 8y ago
    You’re trying to analyze raising children scientifically, and I think that’s impossible. You can never measure bored teens against non-bored teens in any meaningful way. No parent will want to, or be able to participate in a scientific study to tests the effects of boredom on their teens. What would that even look like? Randomize parents in two groups, and have them change their parenting in prescribed ways? No parent would agree to that. Even if you did that study, and parents didn’t fail to follow the instructions, the results wouldn’t be applicable. Humans are different. What works for one teen may be counterproductive for another. You could get an average impact of 0, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t impact on a per-teen basis. And of course, you don’t even know what outcome you want to optimize for. Is it grades? Number of friends? Salary at age 35? Raising kids is (for better or worse) completely unscientific. Discussions are based in anecdotes and personal experience, not statistics.
    - mmmmpancakes 8y ago
      “You’re trying to analyze raising children scientifically, and I think that’s impossible.” You lost me already. You are flippantly dismissing everyone in developmental psychology and related fields with no justification.
sizzle 8y ago
Mindfulness and mediation are great for disengaging from vices and building resilience to addictive triggers and compulsive thinking. I wish someone taught me mediation to rebalance my thoughts as early as high school so I could be more introspective and have more control over my insecurities/tendency to think compulsively.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  IMO, meditation should be taught even to really young kids (say, 4 years old upwards). I imagine they would benefit just as much. Interestingly, some alternative education systems seem to have such an approach. In the waldorf/steiner system (at least this is what I was told), the early years are supposed to be about learning personal discipline and how to work with others. With reading/writing not taught until later (age 7). The idea being that the kids will learn much quicker if they can concentrate and focus on their work. Makes a lot of sense to me.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    IMO, we should all become monks (if you live in Theravada country its tradiion) at age 20 and then give up. Why? You have great experience, and no one obligees you to stay. You can stay for a few months (Like countries Vietnam, Cambodia etc)
kakarot 8y ago
> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. We've shown that cocaine addiction can be mitigated or altogether avoided by enough positive social interaction. When the benefits that cocaine would provide to the dopamine system are already present from other external sources, the rat is much less likely to self-administrate cocaine to "self-medicate", and this is likely further modulated by if medicating inhibits the rat's ability to continue getting dopamine from other sources. It's clear that psychosocial health is a huge factor in avoiding addiction. Another huge factor more relevant to today's era is post-capitalist existentialism, which we can't really test with lab rats but I'll be damned if it doesn't make me want to erode away inside a warm fuzzy ball of artificial pleasure sometimes. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0246-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0246-6
hopler 8y ago
The rat park study found that a good environment did make opioids less attractive, but also found (and downplayed, dishonest science) that rats in the good environment still did prefer opiods to water when the opioids didn't have a bitter taste. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
el_nahual 8y ago
A bit of a nitpick here but I think "Light weight drugs in small doses are less bad: 90s vs now." has a [citation needed]. In my (anecdotal, personal) experience, a heavy weight, sporadically used drug is much more effective than a light weight ones, especially for mental issues. My heuristic for this is the following: 1. All psychic drugs have a main effect + side effect. 2. The benefit comes from changing your baseline mental "loops". This can happen slowly, or quickly, but requires something to be different. [citation needed] 3. Main effects can be, when taken to excess, if not necessarily _fun_, then certainly _different_, or new. 4. The industry is averse to their drugs being fun, because it leads to "abuse". So they only sell drugs where the main effect is small. 5. This means that most psychic drugs provoke a small change to baseline mental state, and (proportionally) large changes to everything else. So you feel a _little_ better, maybe, and very constipated/sleepless/irritated/whatever. 6. The ideal treatment would actually be super powerful drugs, like psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, or LSD, taken very sporadically and in controlled (but not clinical) settings. Of course, this will never happen because of point (4).
sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
That forest kindergarden looks awesome. Too bad it's a liability hell in basically all western countries. Freedom-oriented laws would solve a lot of problems.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Its actually not. Only in the US.
- prawn 8y ago
  I'm in Australia. My 6yo son attends the same primary school I did 30+ years ago. They now have a "nature play" area with softball-sized rocks and 6' long baseball-diameter logs that the kids use in breaks to build forts, help climb things, etc. They use the rocks to crush things up or build structures in a dry creek. The hover-parent in me can see a million ways it will end in disaster, but aside from a bloodied fingernail and some scrapes, I haven't heard of anything too bad in the 12ish months he's been there. It's a definite trend here in designing play spaces for children.
- dagw 8y ago
  "liability hell" in the sense you mean is pretty much a US concept.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Yes, you could be liable for harm if you do not supervise the kids well. Other than that, the activities are not especially dangerous. Realistically, an unattended playground is vastly more dangerous. Or giving scissors to kids. (Including allegedly kid safe models.)
AstralStorm 8y ago
B: Please bring these studies. If you do misquote the so called "mouse paradise" experiment, please read the original in detail and also further work of the author.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. No, it's not. A lot of popular discussion of addiction is, but that's a very different story.

crooked-v 8y ago

> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. In a study where the rats were placed in a healthy environment they chose food and water over drugs. I'm reminded of the mouse "utopia" experiment, and how people somehow find it surprising or insightful that animals left stuck in an overcrowded cage indefinitely with no entertainment and nothing to do gradually go insane.

AstralStorm 8y ago
Mostly overcrowded and unstructured, breaking nursing socialization behavior of mice via massive interruption of strangers walking through nests and huge noise. (See later experiment with "rooms" for mice.) The strain of mice used was relatively aggressive too. Of course, not quite applicable to humans or even apes.

clubm8 8y ago

Personally I think the issue is, and I struggled for a long time to articulate this... escape. I have always struggled with a cluster of issues... too much tv, too much internet, for a period in college binge drinking, overeating... the big "aha!" was that I was engaging in these behaviors to escape reality. We live in a unique time where if you don't like the reality you're in, you can step into another. Society has rightfully developed stigmas against other harmful behaviors. But the issue is a level deeper. For the first time in history, we can "escape" or "drop out" or whatever you wish to call it without chemicals. It's a powerful urge... after all, if you have a limited time on earth, and the world's information at your fingertips, it becomes extremely tempting to just tune out... everything.

nitrogen 8y ago
Books were an escape vehicle before TV, movies, and games.
- lytedev 8y ago
  Sure, but doesn't it work pretty differently? With books, you're just given words and your brain has to fill in the gaps and actually do some work. With video games and movies, your brain is directly stimulated; shown what to see and hear.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    I know this is the common argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. when I was a kid, the graphics were quite primitive by today's standards, but playing the games at that age felt like stepping into a vivid other world. playing as an adult, I just see a bunch of geometry with shitty lighting while I run around clicking on HP sponges. I wouldn't say that video games are quite as stimulating as reading a good book, but I think we underestimate how much our imagination works to "fill in the gaps" to make games feel real and rewarding.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dkersten 8y ago
      And how we used to think whatever the latest in graphics was, was oh so realistic and amazing! I played MUD’s for a few years when I was younger and in hindsight it was amazing: while the writing wasn’t typically as good as a book, you still filled in the world and characters with your imagination and it was both interactive and social. I still have some vivid memories of it that are as clear as if it had been a modern game or movie, despite that in reality I was reading text.
      - bitexploder 8y ago
        Some MUDs back in the day had combat and skill systems as complex as any modern MMOs. They were the precursor to MMORPG.

brightball 8y ago

Some friends of mine and their girls moved to Germany for 2 years and talk non-stop about these schools. They say it’s the thing they miss the most.

ssivark 8y ago

Forest Kindergartens remind me of a movie I quite liked, which others might find interesting: Captain Fantastic (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/

jungler 8y ago

The more I think about the "boredom is good" concept, the more I suspect it's flawed. Bored kids get into trouble, especially as they get older. By 18, a very bored kid left to chance will have found an unhealthy outlet like drinking or property theft. We have a lot of screens now. But it's what one sees and does with the screen that matters. There is an element of media as pollution in this, but it's contrasted against our notion of "the classics". We always end up with a youth that is a mixture of the misspent and the classics.

mmmmpancakes 8y ago
“By 18, a very bored kid left to chance will have found an unhealthy outlet like drinking or property theft.” Do you have some statistics to back up this claim, along with a comparison against teens who are not bored?
- marcell 8y ago
  You’re trying to analyze raising children scientifically, and I think that’s impossible. You can never measure bored teens against non-bored teens in any meaningful way. No parent will want to, or be able to participate in a scientific study to tests the effects of boredom on their teens. What would that even look like? Randomize parents in two groups, and have them change their parenting in prescribed ways? No parent would agree to that. Even if you did that study, and parents didn’t fail to follow the instructions, the results wouldn’t be applicable. Humans are different. What works for one teen may be counterproductive for another. You could get an average impact of 0, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t impact on a per-teen basis. And of course, you don’t even know what outcome you want to optimize for. Is it grades? Number of friends? Salary at age 35? Raising kids is (for better or worse) completely unscientific. Discussions are based in anecdotes and personal experience, not statistics.
  - mmmmpancakes 8y ago
    “You’re trying to analyze raising children scientifically, and I think that’s impossible.” You lost me already. You are flippantly dismissing everyone in developmental psychology and related fields with no justification.

sizzle 8y ago

Mindfulness and mediation are great for disengaging from vices and building resilience to addictive triggers and compulsive thinking. I wish someone taught me mediation to rebalance my thoughts as early as high school so I could be more introspective and have more control over my insecurities/tendency to think compulsively.

nicoburns 8y ago
IMO, meditation should be taught even to really young kids (say, 4 years old upwards). I imagine they would benefit just as much. Interestingly, some alternative education systems seem to have such an approach. In the waldorf/steiner system (at least this is what I was told), the early years are supposed to be about learning personal discipline and how to work with others. With reading/writing not taught until later (age 7). The idea being that the kids will learn much quicker if they can concentrate and focus on their work. Makes a lot of sense to me.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  IMO, we should all become monks (if you live in Theravada country its tradiion) at age 20 and then give up. Why? You have great experience, and no one obligees you to stay. You can stay for a few months (Like countries Vietnam, Cambodia etc)

kakarot 8y ago

> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. We've shown that cocaine addiction can be mitigated or altogether avoided by enough positive social interaction. When the benefits that cocaine would provide to the dopamine system are already present from other external sources, the rat is much less likely to self-administrate cocaine to "self-medicate", and this is likely further modulated by if medicating inhibits the rat's ability to continue getting dopamine from other sources. It's clear that psychosocial health is a huge factor in avoiding addiction. Another huge factor more relevant to today's era is post-capitalist existentialism, which we can't really test with lab rats but I'll be damned if it doesn't make me want to erode away inside a warm fuzzy ball of artificial pleasure sometimes. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0246-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0246-6

hopler 8y ago

The rat park study found that a good environment did make opioids less attractive, but also found (and downplayed, dishonest science) that rats in the good environment still did prefer opiods to water when the opioids didn't have a bitter taste. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

el_nahual 8y ago

A bit of a nitpick here but I think "Light weight drugs in small doses are less bad: 90s vs now." has a [citation needed]. In my (anecdotal, personal) experience, a heavy weight, sporadically used drug is much more effective than a light weight ones, especially for mental issues. My heuristic for this is the following: 1. All psychic drugs have a main effect + side effect. 2. The benefit comes from changing your baseline mental "loops". This can happen slowly, or quickly, but requires something to be different. [citation needed] 3. Main effects can be, when taken to excess, if not necessarily _fun_, then certainly _different_, or new. 4. The industry is averse to their drugs being fun, because it leads to "abuse". So they only sell drugs where the main effect is small. 5. This means that most psychic drugs provoke a small change to baseline mental state, and (proportionally) large changes to everything else. So you feel a _little_ better, maybe, and very constipated/sleepless/irritated/whatever. 6. The ideal treatment would actually be super powerful drugs, like psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, or LSD, taken very sporadically and in controlled (but not clinical) settings. Of course, this will never happen because of point (4).

sarcasmOrTears 8y ago

That forest kindergarden looks awesome. Too bad it's a liability hell in basically all western countries. Freedom-oriented laws would solve a lot of problems.

ThomPete 8y ago
Its actually not. Only in the US.
prawn 8y ago
I'm in Australia. My 6yo son attends the same primary school I did 30+ years ago. They now have a "nature play" area with softball-sized rocks and 6' long baseball-diameter logs that the kids use in breaks to build forts, help climb things, etc. They use the rocks to crush things up or build structures in a dry creek. The hover-parent in me can see a million ways it will end in disaster, but aside from a bloodied fingernail and some scrapes, I haven't heard of anything too bad in the 12ish months he's been there. It's a definite trend here in designing play spaces for children.
dagw 8y ago
"liability hell" in the sense you mean is pretty much a US concept.
AstralStorm 8y ago
Yes, you could be liable for harm if you do not supervise the kids well. Other than that, the activities are not especially dangerous. Realistically, an unattended playground is vastly more dangerous. Or giving scissors to kids. (Including allegedly kid safe models.)

AstralStorm 8y ago

B: Please bring these studies. If you do misquote the so called "mouse paradise" experiment, please read the original in detail and also further work of the author.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> When rats are put in normal laboratory settings they choose drugs over food and water if given the choice. Most of our research on addiction is based on this. No, it's not. A lot of popular discussion of addiction is, but that's a very different story.