Hacker News Reader

Comment by medion | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. Sometimes you don’t need 10 peer reviewed articles to just know when something is bad. Were you the guy in the 60s saying smoking was totally fine because studies? Sometimes you just know inhaling smoke everyday is probably not good for you.

Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.

View on HN

> Smart phones for kids is not good. It’s really simple.

The shape of the computer doesn't magically make it bad: It's what kids do that's the problem.

We took our kids tablets away because they weren't disengaging. But that's because they were into Youtube, which is highly addictive. If they were just using the tablets as e-readers, it would be a different story.

But they weren’t using them as e-readers. Why would they, kids books with beautiful illustrations are 1000x better.

That's for when they know how to read.

There are also e-readers that read along with the book, which are good for very young children who are just learning basic words.

How many kids use it for non-addictive purposes and put it away after an hour of use without raising trouble when it's taken away?

We had a mountain of data to show that smoking causes cancer by the 1950s, the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it. Same with asbestos and most of the other examples people point to.

We don't have that data for smartphones. It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms. As far as we can tell, the association between smartphone use and poor mental health is strongly concentrated in a minority of people with very high usage. There's a strong probability that the causality behind this association runs in the opposite direction - troubled people spend lots of time using digital devices, because they're escaping their troubled lives.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6883663/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01825-4

> the industry just spent a lot of money on lobbying and PR to obfuscate it

> It's an extremely mixed picture, showing both benefits and harms

So... you're saying it's similar.

Yes, you do. I fundamentally disagree with you and don’t think you have reliable evidence to back up this claim. This reads like the pseudoscientists that are convinced aspartame causes cancer.

Sounds like contrarian nerdism to me.

Or a parent that's tired of the alarmism and peer pressure to parent a certain way, like abstinence pledges? The whole premise of these sorts of campaigns are based on flimsy evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com