Apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children

My parents limited video game time, and I think they were right to do so. I still managed to become a (fairly skilled, I hope) software developer.

Putting predictable enforced limits goes long way to stop that. It just works and still allows them game time. People tend to relax those rules as kids grow and problems disappear.

I knew multiple people who had trouble later in school because of inability to not play till morning before major test. You really want your child to be able to stop game after a while of playing.

Was it restrictive? Incredibly so. But maybe I wouldn't be doing what I do today if it was any different - if my computer access was unlimited and "common" - because it was so restricted I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing for each use which obviously had effects on my entire career later on.

It makes the most sense to me to expand time to use in adolescence, and what can be used in teenage years.

For the life of me I can't figure out how these apps make money. They're like flotsam in the Google App store, so they're making money somehow. For all I know they turn on the microphone and send the data to a rogue organization.

This is very different to when I grew up. I had to write my games in Basic (I got them in the back of a catalog!) and I learned how to modify them. I plan on giving her free use of any of my Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and if she shows interest in those big, expensive RGB LED matrices, I'll buy those for her. She can go nuts with those!

Surely there are blogger parents who do the work to find decent games for kids, educational or otherwise?

As for good games with educational value, I'd point to obvious examples like Kerbal Space Program (makes 12 years old learn the math behind rocketry and orbital dynamics), Minecraft (can make kids learn to program), Zachtronics games like SpaceChem or Shenzhen I/O, and ultimately any narrative-heavy game as a good way for kids from non-English-speaking countries to learn English.

What kind of research have you done on what's available?

I'm genuinely curious as to what's out there and who's working on things like this.

I don't think it's necessary to go all the way and research citations to disprove claims that are just challenging basic common sense without any argument in their support, e.g. I don't really go to great lengths to use data to disprove claims related to astrology.

Note here is a post from way back when I asked if anyone did what I wanted for my child.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299697

As enjoyable as YouTube and similar streaming services are, they are pretty much still TVs, just with millions upon millions of different channels to chose from.

As I pointed out in another comment I think we need to be more nuanced...I agree that YouTube is mostly just like TV with infinite channels...luckily it’s not the only App though...just think of the fun kids can have with google search or Wikipedia.

It's possible to inquire, "For a reasonable definition of 'addiciton' do we see those effects?"

Your cherry picked anecdote is cancelled out by mine: standards in television broadcasting for children. Let's leave subsequent anecdote bandying aside and trust in the scientific method a bit, okay?

There was a time when using x-ray machines in shoe shops seemed totally benign, like a fun, useful thing. Suspicions about that "new thing" as well as others were correct. Including here, that list starts with "comic book" and ends with "internet and facebook" addiction, which are absolutely worth studying.

Television deregulation in the US is the precedent here. Given the modest costs of these sorts of inquiries compared to the massive profits enjoyed by Apple, Google, Samsung et al, it seems like a reasonable use for corporate tax dollars is to be an advocate for the general populace and make assurances these products are not in fact harmful.

Why is this such a challenging idea? No one is saying, "These are proven bad." They're saying, "We should have a definition of bad and then validate it."

The idea that we're not even allowed to ask the question because it's offensive? Why, that's positively irrational.

It seems like no one cared that when we got powerful supercomputers that fit in our pockets, we couldn't use them like real computers.

These arbitrary limitations are the real problem. I don't think adding to the collective fear of children using computers will help change that. It's more likely to convince parents to choose more control and censorship.

That's a very related problem.

Voter turnout as a percentage of eligible voters was significantly higher, so I don't think that's it.

I know a lot of parents who are over-concerned with their child's "safety". That extends to reading through teenager's texts, severely limiting their exposure to computers, etc.

Naturally, every child is different, and most won't have similar interests to what I had as a child, but speaking from experience: I would not have flourished in such an environment. I would never have had the liberty to mod video games, install Linux, etc. in a situation like that. I wouldn't have even encountered an interest in such things.

A concern with what a child does on his or her own can easily evolve into overbearing control and censorship. I want every parent to understand that.

It's perfectly reasonable for a parent to decide their child should spend time away from computers.

It's also very easy to take this reaction too far. Deciding what a child should do with a computer, or even that a child should not spend more than 10-20min. at a time using a computer seems reasonable, or even necessary to a lot of parents. Such a situation would have been extremely detrimental to my childhood.

It's easy to overcompensate for things like this, just like it is easy to overcompensate for safety. Parents who know better are likely to ignore studies like this, but others will definitely use these studies to excuse their own draconian censorship, privacy violation, etc.

> This is also why sex ed is important, BTW.

Correct thoughtful sex ed is important. Teaching children to stay away from or fear their sexuality is detrimental, yet it is still common practice. It would be nice to be able to expect a reasonable reaction from everyone, but the fact is that we simply can't.

I think the focus of studies like this misses the mark. Children need variety, so it's important for parents to push them out the door from time to time. Unfortunately, a lot of parents find it more important to schedule every moment of their child's life, make every decision for their child, or be somewhere in between. That attitude leads them to awful things like censorship, and privacy intrusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...

My personal experiences are valid.

Fear and control would have directly affected me, and I am certain that would have been to my detriment.

Also, commonplace firewalls that are made to keep them away from porn, but track them, have serious false-positives, and are often trivially circumvented, giving a false sense of security.

Another thing that really bothers me is that Microsoft convinces practically every school to use their software by giving it to schools "for free", and convincing educators that there are no viable alternatives.

Children usually don't get any opportunity to use a computer freely, i. e. installing other OS's, or even installing software. This means the only opportunities they get are at home, and many don't have their own authority over a real computer at home, either.

It's commonplace for young teenagers to learn how to circumvent arbitrary "security" measures so that they can find liberty, but that isn't always trivial enough to happen. These barriers do more damage than good.

Siri's answers are monotonous and boring compared to Google's.

(If it's done ineffectively or fraudulently, that's a problem, but the problem there seems to be the fraud.)

To be clear, usages of the term "virtue signalling" to describe the behaviour of an individual, don't usually usually imply the same degree of sociopathy that it does when applied to the actions of a corporation. An individual doing "virtue signalling" is simply learning signals that tend to make people react by calling them a good person, and then parroting those signals, without necessarily doing much to learn about the content of those signals.

A better term for the individual behaviour might be "cargo-cult virtuousness"—which makes even more sense when put together with an assumption that people will be cargo-culting the "ritual" of a virtuous behaviour from other people who also cargo-culted the ritual, and so the ritual being performed will decay in this retransmission until it consists only of the observable actions that get people to call you virtuous, without holding any of the content that actually is virtuous.

Which is to say, in an environment with centralized teachings of moral ritual (like a religious congregation with active preaching), the only kind of virtue signalling that works is to actually do consensus-virtuous acts, because everyone is both aware of what the virtuous rituals are, and also aware that everyone else is aware of what the virtuous rituals are. In such an environment, it requires an active intent toward deception to merely signal virtue.

Meanwhile, in an environment where the idea of virtuous ritual is merely spread memetically, between families and peer groups, it is easy for a the idea of a virtuous ritual to become corrupted such that people can actually think themselves virtuous (and others can actually think that person virtuous) based solely on the performance of the "hollowed out" virtue ritual.

To reiterate, the point of virtue-signalling is to point to the thing that goes on in both contexts above: the thing that is active deception in communities with centrally-dictated virtue ritual; and the thing that is unquestioned cargo-cult-ism in communities with peerwise-transmitted virtue ritual.