4 ms·

> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it. I'm not so sure if this is true. No clue about kids,

> If you're stuck in a room and the only thing you can do is read a math textbook you are going to do it. I'm not so sure if this is true. No clue about kids, but if I'm (personally) stuck at the office and I'm really not feeling like working, I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place with lots to do (like home, lol) but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me. I suspect the problem isn't the phones, the problem is lack of honest, genuine interest. Compliance can be enforced, but I'm not sure about efficiency of learning under duress. Compulsion brings aversion. This, of course, is a purely idealistic view, assuming ideal high-skilled spherical educators in vacuum rather than actual real-world conditions. While there are always ways to captivate interest and steer it into productive learning, it requires some orders of magnitude more resources than what's available.

lukeschlather 2y ago
> I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me. I mean there's a very broad spectrum here, and a slight distraction can be the difference between spending 5 minutes staring at a wall followed by three hours in flow state vs. spending three hours in mindless distractions. And children don't have any experience in how to cultivate flow state in the presence of distraction. Removing distractions naturally provides more opportunities to find the flow.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  I agree. An adult can ask themselves what they're doing and why and how it aligns with their interests so on (aka have that midlife crisis, haha), a kid probably doesn't yet have enough self-reflection capacity yet. In my perception, distractions are ideally managed through interest management. Make the desired task actually truly desired - and you're guaranteed to not get distracted. And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working. When you don't have someone to help with "why am I doing this and not that?", I guess it's true that next best option is to eliminate potential of distraction. It's not great, but is probably better than not doing anything about it. So, as always, there is an ideal approach (that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment), and a working approach that's very contrary to the ideal way of doing things. Hm... Maybe teaching kids (and adults) about the modern attention/spam economy actually works can help to lower the distractions. After you see through attention-grabbing tricks, scrolling through online feed wastewaters (or watching junk on streaming platforms, or playing "games" whose entire raison d'être is to make money on players) becomes much less interesting or rewarding. Just a thought.
  - _w1tm 2y ago
    > And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working. The reason primary education is mandatory is because the average kid doesn’t want to sit there learning things. Even some parents barely care. We have collectively decided to force these children to sit through school because we want the population to have at least some basic skills. Catering to the outliers would not be efficient, sometimes people need to be coerced to set a minimum standard.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      I don't argue against compulsory education and minimum standards. I strongly agree that they are an absolute necessity. I was an outlier. Used to study well while it was interesting - just because I had access to the books and I loved reading. But around 9th grade I lost track of some courses, things stopped making sense, everything started to fall apart - and at some point I just optimized away, starting to solve for working around the compulsion rather than necessity to learn. I still learned things I cared about, but subjects where I had a gap in understanding went sideways. The compulsion haven't made me learn anything much, but the means to game the system enough to pass through the hurdles. I worked on some skills like writing tiniest cheat sheets (fine motor skill training haha), basic networking to have someone to copy homework from, composing essays without even opening the source material, confidence tricks, breaking into storage rooms, hacking into computer systems and so on. A valuable social skill set, but probably only for a failing simulacra of a society. (Well, I lived in exactly such a society - one under a post-Soviet curse, so it all fits.) And while those were some fun times, I hate how I had totally lost a lot of opportunities to learn many useful things when I had all the time in the world for it - and way more capable brains than I have in my thirties or forties. I didn't do it because I just didn't knew that I cared about it. I don't blame anyone, of course - things just happened that way. So, I strongly disagree with the "doesn't want" bit. Kids do want to learn things. I wanted to. I believe we all normally do - curiosity and desire to learn is humanity's signature trait. But kids cannot steer themselves, so they need guidance. And compulsion does a poor job as such. But I agree that catering to the outliers is not efficient in present day real-life conditions. Probably not just inefficient, but outright impossible until(if) we ever reach post-scarcity. I even wrote a regret: "[approach] that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment". The compulsion is basically all we realistically have. I just made a note how it's a shame that it's a poor man's solution to a problem that ideally should be solved very differently.
Spooky23 2y ago
It’s more than that. You sitting in your living room watching Netflix instead of working is different than a classroom. In a classroom environment, once one kid is futzing around on their phone, others follow. That creates issues for the teachers who end up policing behavior instead of their jobs. You also have the obvious issues with cheating. When I was the president of a school board, a subset of active and vocal parents were against the ban, citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre. In some cases I had doubts with respect to the veracity of that argument. The parents are a problem too - many have an expectation to text or speak to kids throughout the day. The school handled it well IMO, no phones until grade 5, then kids can have them in their locker and use them at specific times.
- netsharc 2y ago
  > citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre Hah, let's play the "Guess the country this person lives in" game...
croes 2y ago
I bet it's the phone. Even if you're interested a smartphone can distract you. So no smartphone helps those people to focus on the remaining possibilities.

lukeschlather 2y ago

> I can literally stare at a wall daydreaming rather than do something. And the contrary is also true - if I'm "stuck" at some fancy place but feel like working (and have means to do so), there's no stopping me. I mean there's a very broad spectrum here, and a slight distraction can be the difference between spending 5 minutes staring at a wall followed by three hours in flow state vs. spending three hours in mindless distractions. And children don't have any experience in how to cultivate flow state in the presence of distraction. Removing distractions naturally provides more opportunities to find the flow.

drdaeman 2y ago
I agree. An adult can ask themselves what they're doing and why and how it aligns with their interests so on (aka have that midlife crisis, haha), a kid probably doesn't yet have enough self-reflection capacity yet. In my perception, distractions are ideally managed through interest management. Make the desired task actually truly desired - and you're guaranteed to not get distracted. And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working. When you don't have someone to help with "why am I doing this and not that?", I guess it's true that next best option is to eliminate potential of distraction. It's not great, but is probably better than not doing anything about it. So, as always, there is an ideal approach (that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment), and a working approach that's very contrary to the ideal way of doing things. Hm... Maybe teaching kids (and adults) about the modern attention/spam economy actually works can help to lower the distractions. After you see through attention-grabbing tricks, scrolling through online feed wastewaters (or watching junk on streaming platforms, or playing "games" whose entire raison d'être is to make money on players) becomes much less interesting or rewarding. Just a thought.
- _w1tm 2y ago
  > And in an ideal environment, there should be an educator overseeing a kid and asking what went wrong if kid decides they wanna play with their phone instead of working. The reason primary education is mandatory is because the average kid doesn’t want to sit there learning things. Even some parents barely care. We have collectively decided to force these children to sit through school because we want the population to have at least some basic skills. Catering to the outliers would not be efficient, sometimes people need to be coerced to set a minimum standard.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    I don't argue against compulsory education and minimum standards. I strongly agree that they are an absolute necessity. I was an outlier. Used to study well while it was interesting - just because I had access to the books and I loved reading. But around 9th grade I lost track of some courses, things stopped making sense, everything started to fall apart - and at some point I just optimized away, starting to solve for working around the compulsion rather than necessity to learn. I still learned things I cared about, but subjects where I had a gap in understanding went sideways. The compulsion haven't made me learn anything much, but the means to game the system enough to pass through the hurdles. I worked on some skills like writing tiniest cheat sheets (fine motor skill training haha), basic networking to have someone to copy homework from, composing essays without even opening the source material, confidence tricks, breaking into storage rooms, hacking into computer systems and so on. A valuable social skill set, but probably only for a failing simulacra of a society. (Well, I lived in exactly such a society - one under a post-Soviet curse, so it all fits.) And while those were some fun times, I hate how I had totally lost a lot of opportunities to learn many useful things when I had all the time in the world for it - and way more capable brains than I have in my thirties or forties. I didn't do it because I just didn't knew that I cared about it. I don't blame anyone, of course - things just happened that way. So, I strongly disagree with the "doesn't want" bit. Kids do want to learn things. I wanted to. I believe we all normally do - curiosity and desire to learn is humanity's signature trait. But kids cannot steer themselves, so they need guidance. And compulsion does a poor job as such. But I agree that catering to the outliers is not efficient in present day real-life conditions. Probably not just inefficient, but outright impossible until(if) we ever reach post-scarcity. I even wrote a regret: "[approach] that doesn't work because it requires ideal environment". The compulsion is basically all we realistically have. I just made a note how it's a shame that it's a poor man's solution to a problem that ideally should be solved very differently.

Spooky23 2y ago

It’s more than that. You sitting in your living room watching Netflix instead of working is different than a classroom. In a classroom environment, once one kid is futzing around on their phone, others follow. That creates issues for the teachers who end up policing behavior instead of their jobs. You also have the obvious issues with cheating. When I was the president of a school board, a subset of active and vocal parents were against the ban, citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre. In some cases I had doubts with respect to the veracity of that argument. The parents are a problem too - many have an expectation to text or speak to kids throughout the day. The school handled it well IMO, no phones until grade 5, then kids can have them in their locker and use them at specific times.

netsharc 2y ago
> citing a desire say goodbye to their kids in the event of a school massacre Hah, let's play the "Guess the country this person lives in" game...

croes 2y ago

I bet it's the phone. Even if you're interested a smartphone can distract you. So no smartphone helps those people to focus on the remaining possibilities.