Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens
studyfinds.org
studyfinds.org
"Researchers say kids and teens need to get sunlight during the critical years of their development while their eyeballs are still growing.
"The mechanics of how sunlight protects their eyes are not clearly understood. One theory suggests that sunlight triggers the release of dopamine in the retina; another speculates that blue light from the sun protects from the condition.
"The solution is simple. Have kids "spend more time outside, have less demands (from) the schools and relax a bit," said Seang Mei Saw, professor of epidemiology at the National University of Singapore."
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/asia/myopia-east-asia/index.h...
edit: quotation marks
1.5 hours of recess daily minimum or bust for 3rd grade and under, I say, and I think that's not quite enough, really. Screw this 30 minutes crap. Know how I can guarantee my kids have behavior problems at home? Coop them up inside all day. Know how I make a day run smoothly? Make sure they're outside running around at least a couple hours while the sun's up. Then consider that they're giving a bunch of them nearsightedness on top of definitely creating behavioral and learning problems. It's crazy.
May this be reality or not, it's the experienced reality for many. We feel so much pressure to give our kids a head start which results in this rat race starting earlier and harder. I think this is just collateral damage from that shit going wrong. I'm so glad I was a kid in the 80s when playing outside was still normal.
We are fairly worried about 1) eventually having some kind of encounter with child protective services—which will likely end up fine, if it happens, but will also probably be really inconvenient and stressful—and 2) injuries that end up giving us yet another opportunity to play everyone's favorite game, Medical Billing Roulette, especially now that they're riding bikes. Multiple kids, just a matter of time until one of them get a hospital trip out of a bad fall. Odds very low they'll all make it to 18 without at least one broken bone.
God damn do I wish we'd fix healthcare in the US. It's crazy how much background stress & anxiety that causes across just about all activities and choices. And that's with insurance.
[EDIT] although I'm pretty sure the "playing outside" thing tapers off around tween/teen ages in a way it didn't for us, when they all start living on social media. :-/
I consider broken bones to be an integral part of childhood. Well, for boys anyway.
If you make it to 18 without a broken bone, you probably should have spent more time outside.
So my dad was clear to me that any injuries could cause us to have medical expenses that would derail us and my younger sibling’s future as well as the aging grandparents my parents were taking care of.
So I didn’t partake in activities that could have broken bones, but that is the hand my parents and I and others like us are dealt in the great old US of A.
It's completely foreign to me that there exists a first-world country where you need to bar your child from certain activities solely due to concerns over potential medical costs.
That's not a criticism of your parents - their decision was completely logical in the circumstances. It's just a fundamental flaw in the US system.
If you’re not in the upper class or extremely poor class in the US, there is no safety net, so if you want any chance of clawing your way up to having the various securities of life, you have to play it safe.
That said, I spent my childhood outside and never broke a bone myself, but my brother did and ended up having to wear orthotics the rest of his life and routinely experiences discomfort as a result. So, my advice, don’t limit your kids, but teach them to be careful at the same time.
I’m pretty sure if one of my kids break a bone, I’m going to be a wreck.
EDIT: Your comment about boys breaking bones more than girls is ridiculous, as a parent with a daughter who loves risk taking, I can assure you it’s not a boy vs girl problem.
"The lifetime risk of sustaining a fracture in childhood is approximately 42%-64% in boys and 27%-40% in girls, with remarkable variation in the estimates worldwide [1-4]. While fractures more often occur in males, girls usually sustain fractures at a younger age compared to boys"
I never broke a bone as a kid, and not only spent half my youth outdoors but was a daredevil.
Summer: Tree climbing, as high as 50'. Constant bike riding on and off road, skateboarding, go carts, dirt-bikes (hill climbs, jumps), jungle gym, stilts, pogo sticks, trampolines, swings, water-skiing, touch football, street hockey, basketball, and soccer.
Winter: Flexible flyer sledding on steep hills with frequent collisions and wipe-outs (that was half the fun), snowmobiles, tubing, skiing, skitching (when streets are snowy/icy you hold on to a car's bumper and hitch a ride)
One of my own kids has the daredevil streak also and built huge jumps for bikes in summer and snowboards in winter. They'd jump over cars.
No broken bones (lacerations, bruises, sprains however)
On the other hand, I saw a kid break his leg at 2 mph by falling off his bike against a curb.
If it's any consolation, the drawbacks of myopia are fairly negligible. This is one reason there's not a lot of effort expended to prevent it.
2 generations ago it was common to literally lie in the sun for hours putting coconut oil on your skin to increase tanning. And yes they did have higher skin cancer rates but there is a fair gap between that and not doing it + a long sleeve shirt/hat.
Im trying to move to a screen free Sunday to encourage more outdoors/interaction but screens are so ingrained in our lives now its not popular.
The doctor has mentioned in the past that 60+ year old males who've worked farms or building sites their entire lives have a 35%+ strike rate on finding a cancerous mole when they come in for a check.
I'm making an effort to get at least 15 minutes of direct sunlight every day, but at the same time, I make sure to put sunscreen on my face/neck every time I go out.
Modern attire is the problem. Our clothes cover everything but the face, hands and neck, so when we try and increase sunlight exposure, we get huge doses concentrated on these areas.
Ideally, I'd be sunning shirtless and with shorts that cover as little as legally possible. It's a much more sensible approach to boosting Vitamin D levels without risking skin cancer on the face/hands/neck/ears. Nebulous concepts of "social acceptability" be damned.
Much, much higher. And older people who were reasonably active and spent a lot of time outside (even if they didn't deliberately go and sunbathe) have often had one or two cancerous spots cut out.
(I grew up on a farm, and spent a helluva lot of time outside, and needed glasses long before my family had a computer; my father would have spent even more time outside than I did, and likewise is pretty nearsighted.)
I am not a doctor, but imo it is similar to a lot of other health concerns. Predominantly genetic, but you can still affect the outcome in slight ways and improve your chances a bit.
Personal example: my grandfather who has been smoking at least a pack a day since the age of 9, and he is still doing way better in his 80s than majority of people his age. Working in the garden (even physically demanding stuff, like preparing the soil for potatoes every summer), fully mentally sound, etc. On another hand, you have plenty of young people who do everything right (no smoking, healthy diet, regular proper exercise, etc.) falling due to random health ailments. Which goes to show that while taking care of yourself is important and beneficial, the luck of hand you got can override it all in either direction at any moment.
1. Myopia is not entirely genetic, because genes for myopia could not have spread to almost all Koreans from almost no Koreans in the span of 56 years.
2. Myopia is somewhat genetic, because myopia existed in a significant proportion of the pre-industrial population.
I am curious whether 18% was the diagnosed rate of myopia in South Korea in 1955 or the actual rate of myopia in 1955.
In 1955 South Korea was a poor country; now it is one of the wealthier countries (per capita) in the world. On the one hand, it is entirely believable to me that access to eye correction is radically greater than ~70 years ago, and there was a lot of undiagnosed vision problems in 1955. On the other hand, it's also entirely believable to me that literally every 20 year old (male) was given a vision test in 1955 in South Korea, because of the War. On the third hand, it's also entirely believable to me that the vision test given was fairly easy to "pass", and that a many of the people who passed it would have a level of myopia that we would now prescribe glasses for, because hey, better vision is better.
That conclusion is can't be supported from the above fact alone.
It could be a development disorder with a certain probability of occurrence given other non-genetic factors.
Perhaps some pre-industrial people didn't get enough sun time, because they spent too time at home reading. Others had physical eye damage from work activities, etc.
I was outside. If what a small child running around on a farm for hours and hours every day, rain or shine, doesn't count as "being outside more", we need to start using a different word to refer to that.
Back when I first moved into my current place in 2013, I was able to read my stove's clock from across two rooms. My eyesight had steadily degraded since then until last year/early this year, where I needed to step into the closer room before I was able to read it.
...But then, the lockdown started. And since then, despite being on the computer for more of the day and not often going out into the sunlight, my eyesight has been improving. I can clearly read the clock from across both rooms again.
Since I don't really open my blinds, I've gotten pretty much continuous indoor levels of light for two months now, so I've my own theory: It's not specifically sunlight, but having to adjust to the differing brightness between indoor and outdoor light too often that causes issues.
If you are making a positive assertion about the mechanism about myopia, then you are directly contradicting the article, which states the mechanism is not clear. While it may be the case that the article is misrepresenting the science, I personally find this to be unlikely.
In which case, given you are asserting an alternate hypothesis compared to the null hypothesis presented in the article, I do ask you for some more backup to your claims.
I see no problem continuing any of this for 34 collective years.
I eat healthy/exercise and use dark-mode themes where available to minimize glare. That's it's for eye health. I wonder if the negative association of eye health to screen time is less about the screens and more about high blood pressure brought on by being sedentary. High blood pressure absolutely destroys the eyes over time.
You might get issues from focusing at the same distance all the time. Or that theory about dopamine may be true - but if anything, screens are an improvement over things like paper books. And it applies to adolescence anyway.
And nearsightedness is not anywhere near going blind.
I live in constant fear of it (though chance is smol).
And I only played WoW for like 2 years .w.
With that in mind, what is it about a screen (emitted light) that is worse than outdoors reflect light? One item I can think of, is that looking at something with reflected natural light, the iris contracts based on the total amount of light hitting it. Whereas a screen may be brighter than the ambient light in the room, causing more of a point source of light to hit the retinas that would normally happen (which is why I've always found it more comfortable to watch TV with some other light on in the room vs. the room in total darkness).
Sunlight, however, is a wild mix of broadband EM emissions across basically the whole spectrum, as you‘d expect from a glowing ball of plasma (halogen bulbs are actually similar in that regard, they need and do have a UV filter). About a third of the sun’s emitted energy hits the earth’s surface as near infrared light, and then there is UV etc.
Near infrared light is very beneficial, the mitochondria in our cells can increase their energy output as a direct consequence of receiving photons in that frequency range. There are lots of studies that showed improvement of many health conditions following near infrared or red light therapy. I wouldn’t be surprised if NIR light helped prevent myopia too.
However, the structure and function of circuits involved in color representations has been studied to death, and it overwhelmingly points to a tristimulus model where the activation of the S/M/L cones matters, rather than the complete power spectrum of the illuminant. The sensitivity of rods and cones has measured measured with exquisite sensitivity, both behaviorally and by directly recording their electrical activity. Many downstream neurons in visual cortex get their input from individual L/M cones (parvocellular pathway). The others (magno, konio) have a fairly simple mix of inputs from a simple, spatially organized combination of the cones. In some cases (especially within the retina), the individual fibers have been traced and mapped.
There is a hell of a lot we don't know about the brain, but the very early representation of color isn't one of them. If you've got sources saying otherwise, I'd love to see them.
If not, WebVision is an excellent resource with a long chapter about color. https://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-vii-color-vision/co...
The Visual Neurosciences is a behemoth too, if you can find a copy; I don't think it's online.
This happens in developing humans, at some point in adulthood it's suspected this stops (although some people see worsening myopia past the typical age range where it stops).
I literally just had that yesterday, and was wondering what it was. My eyes have always been very good, but I have been a bit worried of late after a few such blurry episodes...
More seriously, what types of activities did screens replace? Was it talking to other people? Physical activities/labor? Reading? Nothing?
For white folk in the US, even the life expectancy at birth (arguably an inflated metric) hasn't increased by 34 years since 1900. For all people in the US (basically everywhere else, too, I think), that ~30-40 years is dominated by infant/youth mortality getting driven hard towards 0.
That seems quite high to me.
Assuming you sleep 8 hours, that only leaves 16 other hours for potential screen time of which 13 we are apparently looking at a screen. Lets assume another 30 minutes a day for getting washed & dressed, bio-breaks, brushing teeth, preparing food + drink etc (30 mins seems low, but I'm being generous), so 15.5 hours left.
So of all of our waking hours, we spend 13/15.5 = 84% of every minute we are awake looking at a screen? 50 seconds of every 60 seconds staring at a screen?
Seems high to me.
Weekends might drag the average down a bit though, spend much less time in front of a screen on Saturday/Sunday.
> Lets assume another 30 minutes a day for getting washed & dressed, bio-breaks, brushing teeth, preparing food + drink etc (30 mins seems low, but I'm being generous), so 15.5 hours left.
Laptop on the dresser/counter playing Youtube. Phones are waterproof—read news or catch up on morning messages in the shower. Laptops that aren't giant bricks and have battery life good enough that you aren't constantly hunting for an outlet and towing your power supply around, plus (even more so) smartphones, have changed everything.
Also depends on how they're counting screen time. Kinda like TV-watching stats. My parents leave their living room TV on probably 15+ hours a day. Does that mean they're "watching TV" if they're making lunch (good view of the TV from the kitchen) but half paying attention to the TV? Or I've come over and we're talking but the TV's on and you (or at least I) can't entirely ignore it?
Even if I spend 10 hours at the office, it's a challenge to get over 7 hours of screen time logged unless I actively avoid all discussions, meetings, and eat lunch at my desk.
If you spend the majority of your life staring at a screen, don't take your eyesight for granted. As you age, it will deteriorate, and it's really not fun, especially when your career/livelihood depends on you being in front of a screen.
Basic news coverage is fine in podcast form, audiobooks work fine for non fiction (going at 2x or 3x speed doesn’t kill the atmosphere) and it makes a good excuse to exercise while listening.
There's debate how much damage that difference causes, but pretending there's no difference is an unhelpful approach.
But seriously, we spend over half of our "healthy years" staring at a screen? This should be begging deep philosophical questions
- How do you want to spend your life?
- When you look back at your life, how do you want to have used your time?
- What is important to you?
Some questions I struggled with when I went on a sabbatical was "what makes me feel alive, really alive?"
Ironically, my answer for many months was, "I don't know, but it's not staring at a screen."
Many other people's answered things like "rock climbing", "sky diving", "going dancing", and I think those are pretty decent answers, but mine settled on "anything that makes me grow".
I also thoroughly spending time with other people in real human-to-human interaction. This feels like a huge slap-in-the-face wakeup call.
The few companies that do promote that -- such as REI... are outdoor companies. Which could lead you to a really pessimistic thought that even the co-op companies are really just profit motivated (I don't believe this, but there is the correlation)
Lot's of wasted time here people. I think this also shows the power of what we can accomplish by spending 10 minutes a day doing something.
1) Is marginal free time actually converted to value (eg, Quality study time vs TikTok infinite scrolling)
2) Can Marginal free time be chained into valuable blocks (saving 1 minute commuting such that you're 2 more minute earl y for 30 appointments, you cannot chain that into a 1 hour study block.
Edit: I will say Ankidroid has helped me get some value out of random deadspace though.
actually, sometimes, doing practically nothing is very valuable for one's state of mind.
For example, last week I've probably spent 50 hours with people front different parts of the word on screen.
Helping them turn waste plastic into 3D printing filament:
https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...
You've spent time with a simulation of those people, their voices lossily compressed with a biased frequency response, their images projected through a non-eye lens on a 2D surface, their heads bigger and closer than you would have in real life, while rest of their bodies hidden, with hundreds of milliseconds delay between interactions. Don't get me wrong, it is a very convincing and useful simulation for many purposes, but it is a simulation nonetheless.
We might have overlooked this previously, but we will slowly be gaining an understanding of the effects of sole social interaction coming through videochat. I know for some, no matter how many zoom calls they do a day, it doesn't come close to creating the same relational satiety.
That is the whole point of a simulation. Hyper-palatable food, cocaine, porn etc. they also feel good and even hyper-real in our nervous systems in the short term, but that’s not a good way to judge if they pose long term complications. Though, I’m not saying video chat is necessarily a hyperstimulus, we don’t know yet.
> claiming that online interactions aren't real and are somehow wrong
I’m not saying it is wrong, and in the absence of real thing it is the rational thing to do. But thinking that it is the real thing is kidding ourselves and to the extent it replaces real life interactions, it could have long term harm. I know this is not an exact comparison, but we have already seen this with uni-directional audio-visual entertainment replacing real relationship time. We feel like our favorite youtubers, podcasters, netflix protagonists etc are our friends, or at least relationally worth investing time in (otherwise we wouldn’t consume them). Same might go with the 50 people around the world we videochat.
Maybe reconsider the idea that it is a problematic simulation, because it's really no more a simulation that how our brains translate vibrations and light waves into sounds and pictures in the first place. If video chat is an illusion, then so is face to face communication, as neither one is an unfiltered experience. The filter of standing two feet from someone is only marginally different than the filter of a video chat. The real filter, the one doing the heavy lifting in both cases, is our brains translating the raw data of the physical world into our lived experience.
This is exactly the problem. Our adaptive machinery can adapt to the wrong stimulus and get stuck in that. This is called "reciprocal narrowing" and is the mechanism that sustains addiction. I'm not saying videochat is necessarily the wrong stimulus or has an addictive potential, but being able to adapt doesn't mean it is the right thing for us in the long term.
> felt my social needs sated (if not my physical needs, specifically sex). ... because it's really no more a simulation that how our brains translate vibrations and light waves into sounds and pictures in the first place
This sounds like a reductionistic, cartesian model of what is going on. It assumes something like "Stimulus gets in through my senses, interpreted through my consciousness in my mind and I get what I need" or "my relational needs and my physical needs are mutually separable". Cognitive science experiments show us existence of phenomena like "blindsight", in which there is stimulus processing without possibility of conscious awareness; "implicit learning", in which there is learning without conscious awareness. In other words, our conscious awareness of what is going in is not necessarily a good indicator of what is actually going on, nor if our long term needs being actually met. We don't know if we can delineate relational and physical needs (here by physical I mean physical presence, not necessarily tactile stimulus) or to what extent we can reduce relationality to vibrations and light waves going through our auditory and visual systems.
I want to make it clear, I am not saying videochat is bad, I've spent my whole week videochatting and feel like I've met certain relational needs. But it is nonetheless a simulation, and I actually can feel tired and lonely even after a day full of videochat. I don't intend to equate both, and I want to be careful not to displace the real thing with its simulation when the opportunity arises to be present in person. Just like I need to be careful about diet coke and hyperpalatable fast food not confusing the hell out of me to the point of replacing real, long-term sustainable nutrition.
When I don’t look at a screen for a few days while on vacation my eyesight gets much better.
The rest of the time is just wasted.
- 30/30/30 rule: Every 30 minutes look at something 30 feet away for 30 seconds
- Take regular walks outside: it will lower your blood pressure, and expose your eyes to violet light
- ensure brightness of environment closely matches brightness of screen to prevent eye strain
Now, as an adult, I find that I have my screen's brightness turned up way more than my peers. For example, although it's currently very sunny right now in LA, I have my brightness turned up 100% on my 16" MBP. Though, in the evenings, it's more comfortable at 3 or 4 steps down from 100%.
I can't help but to wonder -- did she condition my eye to be less sensitive to light and have thus slightly ruined my low-light vision?
If at all possible, cut the blue from your screen at all times.
I use flu.x [0] and even during the day I set my color temp to 5800K instead of the standard 6500K. You won't notice the change much, but it will make a huge difference on how tired your eyes get.
I also go down to 1850K at night (candlelight basically) to both ease strain on my eyes and not mess up my sleep. It makes a noticeable difference.
Good to know.
I don't know about the sleep stuff (is that hard science yet?) but I personally definitely staved off eye strain and dry eye issues with f.lux and no other changes.
Sometimes when I travel to the other side of the planet but don't update my laptop clock, it goes into "night mode" midday. I can use it but I find it jarring with the natural light.
> I don't know about the sleep stuff (is that hard science yet?)
They have links to studies on the flux page [0] although I'm not sure how much of that is peer reviewed or if the sample sizes are big enough.
I know that it makes a difference for me. My sleep quality went way up when I started using flux, and it goes down when I look at screens without it too late at night (like my not-so-smart-TV).
I tried them. They worked well enough, but I don't like to wear glasses so I stopped. Also I didn't like how they cut all blue light, including the blue from the sunlight. It's important to get blue light during the day to help your body regulate it's sleep hormone production.
> or setting your screens to grayscale?
That's orthogonal. The white part of the grayscale still has blue light in it. Grayscale is good for helping with attention issues, but not blue light issues.
By going grayscale, it limits how much attention the OS (or any other app) can grab your attention with color.
I tried it, it annoyed the heck out of me, so I went back. But it did work -- it made me less interested in using my devices.
One thing about the show that struck me is that I'm amazed at how inter-personal communication has changed over the decades. I thought I remembered everyone being a lot more easy-going when I was a kid and then decided that I must have imagined it. But no, sure enough, right there on Star Trek you see the characters poking light fun at each other not long after they first met, even in a military setting.
Today people seem to take themselves much more seriously. You have to be a lot more guarded and diplomatic, sometimes even with people you know very well, otherwise you risk alienation or embarrassment. I know TV is not reality, yadda yadda, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot isn't) and Google having given up on "organizing the world's knowledge" or whatever their supposed mission was (now it's plainly "organize the world's advertising dollars into our bank account") so it may be there but good luck finding it.
I could be wrong but just surrounding the field of software development, there's probably already more relevant information on the internet than I could possibly consume in my life.
(of course it may be better for lots of other things, but for a fairly large set of "finding things on the Web" tasks it's way worse than it used to be, to the point of being nearly useless—in part I think this is because sometime around 2008-2010 they stopped trying to fight webspammers, choosing instead to embrace some set of them provided they play by Google's rules, and downrank anything that wasn't "well-behaved" webspam or well-known sites hard)
1) Google and other search engines revised their algorithms more than a decade ago. Instead of showing you results for what you searched for, they now show you what they _think you meant_ based on your search history and the search histories of millions of other users. This means searching for uncommon topics and phrases get you useless results. And you can't disable this functionality because it's baked into the core of how Google indexes and categories the content that it slurps up from the web.
2) Blogspam authors and e-commerce sites have gotten SEO down to a science, to the point where searching for nearly _anything_ not super specific no longer gets you _information_ about that particular thing, it gets you blogspam articles filled with fluff and affiliate links, or half-broken e-commerce sites trying to sell you something vaguely related to what you searched for. This is not technically Google's fault but there is a lot they could do to curb this, but all that ad revenue on those sites is how they earn that sweet sweet lucre.
That had been going on for years, but there'd be clear times when Google got ahead of it and results would get much better for a while, and because search was so much more precise it was possible to work around the spam. That those good times stopped happening and results are now a consistent and fairly high level of "spam-filled" by content that's seemed pretty much the same sort of crap for years, leads me to conclude they stopped trying. IIRC right around then they stopped the "no no, our ads our different and good, they're just text and always formatted the same way so it's easy to tell what they are" and became just another banner ad slinger.
[EDIT] just mined Slashdot for that last bit, looks like that happened around the last half of '07, which roughly checks out with my recollection of Google search abruptly getting much worse around '08-'09 then never getting better again.
Previously I would have had no way of accessing any of that information unless I happened to be at the right university with the right department, or in some high-level research institute.
Some random examples:
- I'm interested in turbine engines, AgentJayZ has a while host of videos taking real turbine engines apart, talking about obscure features like compressor variable valve vanes etc.
- Plumbing, almost everything I've ever needed to know about plumbing has been available from PlumberParts / dereton33.
- Woodworking, I basically learned everything I know from watching people like Matthias Wandel.
- Recently I've been digging to electronics, I have an excellent book "Practical Electronics for Inventors" but every now and again I need to hear a different take on the same things and invariably there is a good video or article which clears it up for me.
What's more, to get the level of detail these guys show for free in book form would mean investing in some seriously expensive books, most of which hide the interesting parts under a lot of uninteresting maths.
Since it is Google, how awesome would it be if videos also had related web searches attached to them, instead of just related videos. How-tos could have links to the original manual, the most detailed maintenance manuals, or patents and blogs detailing the physics behind how that thing works. Probably not going to happen and would only be for power users, but it could be so powerful.
Between libgen, scihub, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, torrent sites, and the rest of the internet we've got access to almost all of the world's knowledge for free with plenty of avenues to interact with experts using a variety of different channels for knowledge that hasn't been put to paper yet.
> access to almost all of the world's knowledge for free
I'd guess we've got access to ~10% of it (but it's a good 10%!) for free, ~30% paid (but usually piratable!), and the remainder unavailable as a paid electronic resource but maybe (often not) as a paid paper one and maybe (often not) available pirated—maybe you can at least locate or learn of its existence with the Web, but possibly it's totally unknown to the Web outside of maybe a reference in some books that happen to be digitized (this does actually happen, though you do usually have to get a little obscure before it does, but sometimes not as obscure as one might think).
[EDIT] to be clear I think the Web is an excellent research tool, however an awful lot of its value in that role is from piracy (saving me, say, having to inter-library-loan or buy a book just to find the books that book name-drops in its preface, or to read one relevant chapter, or to see the book's index so I can find out whether I need it in the first place). I think its containing anything like "all the world's knowledge", even for liberal values of "all", is far from true, and there's a risk of thinking if something exists it's probably available as a digital resource delivered over the Web (far from true), and if it doesn't then surely it's at least possible to find out about its existence on the Web (also not true), and if neither of those are true it must be something of no value whatsoever to anyone or wildly obscure (not true).
[EDIT EDIT] then even if it is on the web, it can be really hard to find something that's not on one of a few major sites using search. More so than it used to be. It can take so damn long that pirating and reading a book on the topic on Libgen can be faster than finding the same info on the open web, even if it's there, which is pretty damning of the state of web indexing. As I wrote in another comment on this thread, it was once possible to be fairly sure when one had reached the edge of Google's knowledge and the thing you're looking for was not in its index—such certainty is now almost impossible, mostly because of how Google search (and seemingly all other web search tools) has changed, not because of increased total content.
Sources like ArXiv, Google Scholar, and Semantic Scholar have made it really easy for me to access tons of deep, academic/professional level knowledge in my field instantaneously and for free. I know that Physics, Math, and Computer Science are relatively uniquely privileged when it comes to ArXiv, but even paywalled journals are more accessible in the internet age than they were before. I'm even able to find public-released technical info from the DoD through DTIC that I don't think I would ever know what to request without having it come up through search engines.
Likewise, tons of undergrad classes through MIT and the Ivies are available for free on Youtube; more still are available with exercises and some form of certification through services like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity. Some graduate and professional-level courses are starting to come online through these institutions as well; the Institute for Advanced Study has started releasing its lectures on Youtube over the past few years.
I can find manuals for my car, my appliances, and all my electronics online. I have access to all sorts of do-it-yourself how-tos on Youtube when I want to do work around the house. I have StackOverflow for when I have challenges with programming languages and tools that aren't clear from the docs, and the rest of the StackOverflow network when I have questions that are more specific to my problem domain.
There's more throughout all sorts of fields: instant translations with Google translate and langauges lessons through DuoLingo, Rosetta Stone, et al; music lessons on Youtube, etc.
Again, I've been through the experience where some older materials just aren't as available as I'd like, and where the normal search tools only bring you part of the way. But I think you're taking a lot for granted here.
That book will probably be in a screen too, since it's way too hard to carry it around on paper.
Even "correspondence with experts" will be on a screen.
But leaving that aside, the 34 years figure is understating the true time spent. That figure is referring to 34 years of 24-hour days. If we subtract 8 hours a day for sleep, it is actually 52 years of our waking hours.
It’s the content, not the medium, that matters.
Comment: "And for 33.9 of those years, it will be at things that are not work related..."
Science journalism is a real problem.
For breaks, she recommended the "20/20/20 rule" - focus your eyes on something at least 20 feet away, for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes of screen usage.
I've been reading up about this a lot as it is something that concerns me, but so far most of what I've says that longterm damage is mitigated by taking regular eye breaks (ie, starting at something 20+ feet away every 20 minutes for 20 seconds) & getting enough sleep (giving the eyes time to properly rest). Are these mitigation strategies insufficient?
Yeah sure a screen is emitting light which maybe makes it worse for the eyes to look at in some ways and situations than a paper page, but "looking at light" is almost an oxymoron - isn't that what eyes do?
A white reflective surface (whiteboard) in direct sunlight is 1.6cd/cm^2. Consumer monitors are ~300cd/cm^2
(I'm not sure how much bearing this actually has on eye health, this is just to illustrate how looking at a monitor and at a piece of paper is significantly different)
Why does it hurt my eyes to look outside after a while looking at a screen in a well lit room? (the sun is not directly visible, just buildings, trees and sky)
I don't mean to sound flippant, but I think sometimes people forget just how insanely energetic stars of all sizes are.
http://www.infocomm.org/filestore/display_specs_and_human_vi...
Thank you for the correction!
I don't understand. Monitors are intended to be set to the same brightness as the ambient environment. 300cd/cm^2 is max, not average.
Of course shining a monitor in your face at maximum brightness is bad, just like staring at a light bulb all day is bad.
At least with [1] tpart of the problem is (very simplified) focusing too long on objects too near (book, screen, ...)
Children who spend a couple hours per day outside have extremely low rates of near-sightedness, so they think there's something about the eyes being exposed to direct sunlight that's necessary for them to grow properly.
It turns out the best way to not damage an organ is to not use it...
Generational skepticism of new technology is played out. Can we move on yet?
Screen time for us was playing games with an educational value and watching TV with at least some educational value.
Recently we've started letting the five year old watch TV purely for entertainment, and the three year old sometimes watches too, but even then, both of them suddenly got a lot better at storytelling and coming up with their own original stories.
So even "pure entertainment" seems to have educational value for the kids.
The rule in our house is that you can't use a screen if the sun is up unless it's a weekend. That seems to be a good balance (although under the current conditions that's flexible if the screen is for an online class).
> The rule in our house is that you can't use a screen if the sun is up unless it's a weekend
I think that's actually limiting screentime more than most US households, you aren't actually on the "no need to limit screentime" side at all!
So they actually get a lot more screen time than most of their peers.
Given he's happy I'm not rocking that boat.
Turns out not every kid loves mornings!
Our kids, who are home with us and in the same room as where both me and my wife work, are able to play by themselves for the most part every weekday from 9-12pm.
Schadenfreude on that one.
Moreover, maybe both sides are right? Maybe you need heavy "screen interaction" to be successful in this world and maybe too much time is being consumed by screens rather than physically interacting with the world. Maybe there is a balance that isn't close to being struck by most.
Maybe I would like my future children (if I have them) to interpret the world largely through their own eyes rather than a clickbait interpretation manufactured to get more money.
When using the tablet they are playing educational games about sorting/identifying shapes and colors, painting by numbers, solving puzzles, etc.
Or watching/listening to songs that are teaching them colors, numbers, letters, etc. And dancing around because they like the music.
These are drilling home lessons in a fun and repetitive way that we simply could not do for our child otherwise. And we've seen educational jumps from it too.
Plus, let's be real, I make my living through a screen. So why is "screen time" stigmatized as a bad thing?
I've come to the realization that screens are not an evil thing to be minimized at all costs. They are the most powerful tool of the modern age.
It's just important to get some exercise and fresh air too.
Some apps just seem predatory.
Because then there's a hope that they'll actually learn the underlying principle and make similar decisions in situations where someone else is not directly in control of their behavior.
There are kids who don't get to eat ice cream before dinner at home because that's the rule, who will happily do so when over at someone else's house without their parents around to enforce that rule. Then there are kids who actually understand why they shouldn't eat ice cream before dinner, who will decline to do so even if they have the opportunity. (That doesn't mean they'll exercise perfect judgment every time, but then, there's also no guarantee they'll follow rules that aren't being enforced.)
It's important to develop the critical thinking skills to filter out "junk food" content.
(To clarify: I'm not talking about children too young to understand the concept, I'm talking about children more than old enough to make such decisions in an informed way. Roughly speaking, think 12, not 3.)
Sure, I agree with you. Limit what they have access to while using the screen, but not the actual screen time.
Somewhat analogous to the difference between limiting junk food from kids' diets vs. making them go full vegan and doing intermittent fasting.
I agree with the sentiment, but an important point is not the forget that behind the curtains there is an army of product managers, AI PhDs and tons of data running a version of Truman Show on each one of us. Usually "you're the product" is blended with "you're consuming the product that adds value". For example, you can search and land to a video to watch something educational, but opaque recommendation algorithms, un-turn-offable autoplays, nagging notifications and whatnot will try to convince you like an optimally-annoying salesman to stay just a little more and pay them in attention and ad revenue, or get you those dopamine hits so that you will want to come back to "just check" the app in a pavlovian fashion.
Whenever you or your kid interact with a screen, you are potentially interacting not only with a machinery with inherent information asymmetry but also one that we train every day exactly how much abuse we are willing to take. For further reading see Tristan Harris and the design ethics questions he brings into light.
Oh boy are they ever. We spend a lot of time curating the kids' screen time. We try every app first.
Youtube Kids is banned. Youtube's AI sucks at vetting content and they refuse to put humans on the job.
The apps from PBS are all gold. Disney+ has so for proven to be good at making sure all the content is kid appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjKmQwhSk1s
It's not exactly a playlist, but you can hand select content.
Edit: I watched the video. I’ll have another look on the app tomorrow but I’m pretty sure that video does what I’m complaining about. The catalogue is pitiful. I just want access to all of YouTube. It’s not a big ask but they won’t make $$ off of Showing adult videos to kids so they won’t offer that.
Creating/creative/thinking time spent on a screen is very different than passive consuming time.
Some parents also think you should be playing with your child at all times and that's absurd too. It's good for kids to learn how to entertain themselves and be creative as individuals. There's not much more obnoxious than kids who grew up with their parents always playing with them or managing their attention and the kids complain about being bored.
It seems to me that the recipe for that ideal self-sufficient-loving-smart-social-over-achieving kids that all parents seem to want to have is sort of a pipe dream, and it always has been, just environment changed. We all want them, but few will end up being one and its often not that much a fault of a parent.
Plenty of love, plenty of time together, some time alone, some with others, well-managed discipline seems like a good start. I would add some traveling and exposure to foreign, exotic cultures. One can't avoid screen time these days, I mean if I want to show my kid to parents during Covid, it has to be via webcam. But passive aimless consumption isn't one for me, and for sure it won't be for my kids. I'll rather put them into rock climbing course.
What happened to topics about billionaires forbidding the access to phones & TV to their kids before age of 7?
I am saying this as an expecting parent. My parents were raised without TV and there is a clear difference on how they processed the information presented to them. Heavens know I do not process it the same way what with being basically raised on internet and tv.
In short, I do not think we should move on. I think it is worthwhile to ask more nuanced questions than 'is screen time bad-discuss'.
Is it, though? Spending lots of time in front of a TV is still considered harmful as it was half a century ago.
One of my kids thrives on screen time because she actively seeks out creative and informative non-passive activities. She is in control of her technology usage rather than the other way around. And even though we keep tabs on her, we trust her completely to manage her own time.
The other gets limited screen time because if we don't put strict limits on it, he has absolutely immense self-control issues. He throws temper tantrums, claims to be bored all the time, picks arguments with others, refuses to follow simple instructions, and won't stay in bed for anything at bed time. Put simply: he displays all the hallmarks of chemical addiction with even a moderate amount of daily screen time. All of this is greatly decreased and comes very close to being a model citizen when we reduce his screen time down to only that which is required for his school work.
And somewhere in there is the fact that human adolescent brains were not designed by evolution to sit indoors all day look at screens or books.
But for those observations, is the problem the screen or what is on the screen? As a society, I'd like us to focus less on the former and more on the latter.
A screen is just a window that become anything, and I don't see why it should be inherently more or less educative than any other experience.
Let's say in the future we get perfect VR headsets that can perfectly replicate every sense. Would the conversation be different?
If you read their 1 page comment history, there's dang explaining "We've banned this account." and why.
The second part of my crisis was that I was no different.
After a few months of dealing with this I remembered that actually they are engaging with an entire world, and so was I. Rhetoric is so stupid sometimes.
I mean I don't stop, because money, but I'd love to be able to take weeks- to months-long breaks from screens.
I also think we might want to compare. I suspect 150 years ago most people stared a shovel 34 years of their life or a clothes washing bowl etc..
Well, ultimately, it is...
That said, some people can (and do, more so in the past) over-read, to the detriment of their social life or even to their health...
>You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?
In our day and age, you wouldn't. But this was definitely a thing in 1800s (regarding books) and in early 1900s (regarding newspapers). Using very similar excuses to rant about those, as the excuses being used today regarding screens too.
And even earlier, in Ancient Greece, tons of prolific philosophers were strongly opposed to writing and books as a concept, as they believed that writing things down and learning from that (as opposed to oral learning) was eroding abilities that relied on memory (which parallels really well with people currently complaining about search engines removing the hard need for memorizing things).
However, knowing this only makes your original point stronger.
Probably HN is packed with better than average active users of screens than the general population.
Actually there is a colloquialism for that since the early 1900's: "Nose in a book"
To your point no one actually has their nose in the book.
Otherwise might as well say we look for our life. It is not staring at. It is something else.
>_>
If we want to be pessimistic and reductionist there’s many other ways to do this too