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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid.

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Parents bend over backwards making excuses for why their kids need phones.

The real reason: Phones keep kids distracted so parents are then free to browse TikTok/IG/FB/etc themselves.

This is an unnecessary ad hominem. GP could give the phone to the kid only for the purpose of emergencies, for example.

In the cause of a school shooting (that’s statistically almost not bound to happen), phoning your child is a liability likely to get more people killed than an asset.

I think they'd want the kid to phone them

> in event of a school shooting.

So it's not for their wellbeing, it's for parental anxiety.

This is a good opportunity to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

That's basically the only interpretation of what you said. What other interpretation is there?

> It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words.

Can someone put me in touch with Sam Altman? I just had a great idea for an application of ChatGPT.

Same. This is the reason my daughter has one. Things are getting extremely hot out there and no one seems willing to do anything about it.

What do you mean by things getting "hot" out there? Are you monitoring any signals or predictors of school shootings at your daughter's school?

Sorry, genuinely trying to understand your perspective here.

Maybe buy them a Nokia 1100 instead?

I give her my old iPhone that's already paid off when I upgrade (and that I can put parental controls on.)

It's extremely unlikely that your kid will die in a school shooting.

> Address the root cause

It would still be the case that sometimes children die in freak ultra-low-probability events, even if there were zero school shootings.

We prepare for unlikely events all the time. Impact is another metric that we respond to. I simply multiply the two together.

It’s extremely unlikely a given kid will be present at all during any kind of shooting at school, the vast majority of which aren’t indiscriminate killings and which may not involve students or staff at all (a shooting that just happens to take place with at least one involved party standing on school property)—over all 13 years of k-12 school.

I ran the numbers and it was firmly in “not even worth a thought” territory. I cast the net of the definition of “school shooting” as wide as remotely reasonable, and made the criterion present at the building for, not hurt or killed, and it was still not worth worrying about.

The odds are even better in the kinds of schools HNers are likely to send their kids to, since a ton of those shootings are drug- and/or gang-related.

> We prepare for unlikely events all the time. Impact is another metric that we respond to. I simply multiply the two together.

But we don't design our lives around those unlikely events. Nuclear war is extremely serious, but extremely unlikely in the short term. By you logic, we should all be living in fallout shelters basically all the time, just in case.

To reinforce your point, I think any given person is much, much more likely to die due to nuclear war than in a school shooting.

If you feel that the last number is infinite, then the outcome of this computation is not going to be surprising.

Dumb phones and watches provide the communication ability without the potential for being sucked in.

People keep saying this but like, who wants to hear your kids last words like that?

I call bullshit on this one. I think it's something someone said because who is gonna push back on that one and then it caught on.

Don't accept that.

I had an immediate family member in a similar scenario. I think those closest to a problem are the best able to make decision about it.

People far from a problem deciding how you should solve is like a boss telling you how to solve a coding issue. They aren't close enough to understand important details that affect the decision.

You're suggesting that the solution to school shootings is to ensure that all children have smartphones, not that less people should have access to guns?

I would easily say yes to the offer of ban phones in schools in return for a ban on all guns. Unfortunately no one is willing to extend that offer.

It would be a win-win.

Braver of you to say it, but I agree. This seems like a trauma fantasy at best.

Oh great, this made me switch sides on this whole argument. Horrifying black swan events are very motivating.

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