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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it."

Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.

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What are the "objectively harmful externalities" you're referring to?

There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a phone culture.

More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.

See e.g. https://kagi.com/search?q=summary+of+mental+health+outcomes+... -- there are far too many sources to even list here.

I appreciate that there is a body of research discussing possible implications of large-scale phone connectivity, but this does not meet the bar of "objectively harmful externalities".

I'm not even talking about methodologies or replication or evidence or p-hacking (all of which are huge challenges to this sort of research).

On a much more fundamental level, the statement "unauthorized smartphone use in a classroom setting is objectively harmful" is a defensible statement. I don't need a study to tell me that, nor should anyone. The extraordinary claim in this case would be the opposite, for which I would have to see tremendous evidence, and which even then I would likely not believe.

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