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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Sure, rather than go after the actual source of the problem (large social media companies that knowingly enact policies that harm children), that would ruffle too many donor feathers, so we make a gesture at correcting the problem that will ultimately do very little to protect children. Wonderful. Sorry for my cynicism but this is so beyond the pale. If he'd given literally any other reason I would buy it, I do not believe smart phones have a place on campus during school hours for most use cases.

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Social networks aren't the only reason that phones shouldn't be in schools. There are very few good reasons why a kid should be looking at their phone in school. Kids having phones is just a sweet spot where parental paranoia (legitimate) intersected with the opportunity to indulge your children (they're begging for it), with a luxury item that kids could discriminate against each other over (social disorder.)

I accept that it's understandable that we did the experiment, because it was a new device, but it offers no significant benefit to the parents and children (in fact playing into their neuroticism), and allowed companies a new way to go after those children to exploit their insecurities for money. It's moronic that we got rid of Saturday morning cartoons because they were just longform ads aimed at kids (but they were fun!), yet we allowed this contagion in school.

They shouldn't even be on Wikipedia in school. There's a teacher there, speaking, and a book. Look at Wikipedia at home. The teacher is expensive and only available at certain times, Wikipedia is cheap and always there.

I couldn't disagree more. Children don't need 24/7 unfettered access to intensely dopaminergic mental stimulation that is equivalent to junk food. They need focused minds, not the constantly searching monkey mind that is amplified by having a phone in your pocket from age 13.

>intensely dopaminergic mental stimulation

Adults need to stop regurgitating 1970s era neuroscience tropes long proven false as if they were facts. You come off like someone pointing at their monitor declaring the internet is broken because the monitor is set to the wrong display input. Not even wrong. These extremely scientificially incorrect memes re: "dopamine" and "screens" are far more dangerous to society than looking at screens ever could be because they're used to justify use of physical force against human persons in contexts where there is no force or coercion or fraud.

There are quite a few of these studies from the modern era about the effect that these devices have on children. They posit the exact opposite of what you're saying here, and have data to back it up. I presume that these are what you're referring to as "non-scientific" here and have specific issues with their methodology, and not just disliking the concept that phone/social media could be bad in some fashion.

Can you explain why they are all false?

I'll put in as much effort in my rebutal as was shown in the initial false statement (very little). In the 60/70s there was this idea that dopaminergic populations of neurons (of which there are many with different roles, but here lets simply talk about the mesolimbic populations in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NAc). Early electrophysiological studies found that activiating these populations could lead to animal models doing whatever was necessary to get them stimulated again. This lead to the idea of dopamine as the "pleasure chemical". But since then it's been found that in the VTA and (shell of) the NAc the dopaminergic populations don't actually encode for pleasure or reward at all. The reward/pleasure is mediated almost entirely by glutamergic neurons in the NAc, and the dopaminergic projections there from the VTA encode for belief in possible future reward, not reward itself. Dopamine is wanting (prediction of liking), not liking.

Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking. It needs no special disproval; the burden of proof is on such a wild unphysical claim. Screens are not, and cannot be "addictive". That word has a medical meaning and it does not cover screens. You may object and say, "But what of gambling?" to which I respond, the DSM5+ and ICD10 both have it as "gambling disorder" because it's not an addiction and it's a grandfathered in disorder at that; all by itself. Additionally, the DSM spent the last decade addressing the potential issue of "screens" and each commitee returned with the same conclusion: not enough evidence for inclusion (latest was 2022).

If you really do want to learn the nitty gritty details and see the references I suggest starting with Kent Berridge's lab on affective neuroscience and his review papers, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/

I don't think anyone is claiming this:

> Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking.

Or at least it's not the damning point you're making it out to be. I think there is an issue with smartphones, attention, and development, but I don't claim that screens are anything other than an audiovisual medium. Nor do I think they need to increase specifically "incentive salience without intrinsic pleasure" to be a problem.

Do you not see gambling addiction as an issue in real life? Do you not see massively decreased attention statistics as an issue in real life? It feels like you're arguing against a position that is both incorrect and irrelevant, when the rest of us are talking about things that are obviously an issue in real life, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with this approach.

Do you not struggle with anything like what is being discussed here, or see it in others?

No one is claiming it, true. They don't understand their claims stem entirely from this position and only make any sort of sense if they claim it. But they don't have the background knowledge to work out the foundations of their statement.

My personal experience and emotional response has no relevance to the neuroscience involved. As for your continued use of "gambling addiction": There is no such thing as gambling addiction medically as I explained. It's a social meme without basis that is overloading the word mostly for profit in non-medical "addiction" treatment centers. This is far more dangerous than the very gambling disorder it hopes to mitigate.

The issue is that the claims do not in any way stem from the concept that screens are the issue. Everyone else is talking about how the usage and content delivered through the screens are the issue. What you're describing seems to be semantics at best. It's akin to people talking about not going to strip clubs, and you saying "what's wrong with stages?".

But there is a lot of modern research towards these questions. But more importantly: most of us see and feel and experience the challenges of inattention and screen time in our real lives. Do you not have those same experiences?

I've never once looked at a study, nor could I possibly care less what some numbers on a paper say when I've got evidence in front of my own eyes. I'm speaking from experience, kids today are smooth-brained idiots that don't understand how to do some of the most basic things in life, nor do they have any desire to learn. I'm not some screeching, out of touch boomer, I'm someone who is in my mid-20s who has grown up floating in this shit-tank, and I'm so tied of watching people around me being preyed on by predatory algorithms.

This is not some "Oh, curse these wretched novels, polluting the minds of our children with fiction!" This is the recognition that we have released a technology with an addiction cycle that has been intentionally built and tweaked to engage users and keep them on their platform as long as possible, and the human brain is not evolutionarily equipped to deal with that, least of all the developing mind of a child. They have neither the self-control nor the awareness of what's going on to determine that they're feeding an addiction that their parents enabled. Getting Entertainment Boxes™ out of places of education is a great first step in that direction.

> I'm speaking from experience, kids today are smooth-brained idiots that don't understand how to do some of the most basic things in life, nor do they have any desire to learn. I'm not some screeching, out of touch boomer, I'm someone who is in my mid-20s who has grown up floating in this shit-tank, and I'm so tied of watching people around me being preyed on by predatory algorithms.

Well said, and I concur. I think we are precisely the right age to have seen a decent amount of the transition, too.

If you’re at school, you’re there for learning activities, not phone activities. I don’t think you’ll find too many people on HN that think all digital entertainment is bad, we’re just saying kids need guardrails and limits, and there is little practical use for cell phones at school vs the damage they do to the learning experience.

Where in what I said says they do?

how do you address the source of the problem?

Isn't removing cell phones during school use a step in the right direction?

Hold social media companies like meta accountable for the harm they know they are inflicting on children? Why is that impossible?

What do you suggest they persecute facebook for? Making their app too fun for school?

Are you unaware of this massive story? https://www.thewellnews.com/mental-health/whistleblower-says...

There are plenty of other examples, such as default features they can put into place to protect children from harassment that they simply do not do.

So what? Killing a scapegoat does not a problem solve. You shut down facebook and then what happens? Everyone shuts the phone and enjoy the sunset or would they all just move to the next addictive app? Marlboros are not harmful, tobacco is. If we managed to largely curb smoking, it was by restricting access to tobacco.

A scapegoat? Who is the problem then, if not them? No one is suggesting shutting them down either - the proposal is to hold them accountable for enacting policies they know harm children. Who in their right mind would be against that except a meta astroturfer? It would help your argument a lot more if you didn't resort to ridiculous hyperbole like this.

>Who is the problem then, if not them?

Why is that the only people responsible for their children in any way at all whatsoever are never held accountable?? It is always, 100%, in every and all cases, the parent's fault. Either they're too stupid to know better, or they simply don't care.

Social media is far from the only distraction on phones, though. I spend next to zero time on social media, but my phone is nevertheless a powerful distraction for all the other things it can do.

Ok, but that's entirely separate from the reason given for the proposed phone ban.

I don't think social media addiction and other-mobile-phone-screen addiction are "entirely separate" reasons, no?

Is it? He used the surgeon general's recent moves as a starting point in his statement and continued "When children and teens are in school, they should be focused on their studies — not their screens.".

Why is it easier than getting rid of phones?

Found the smartphone addict

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