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Comment by ben_hn | Hacker News Reader

It's not phones or tablets. It's the wrong doing apps / social netwrks / games. Same applies to friends: there are friend circles that bring only bad behaviors. We don't ban friendship because of that. Ban social network apps. Ban addictive games. Ban notifications and any other FOMO-triggering mechanisms. Don't ban phones.

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OK, but anyone who makes this argument should at least put some effort into thinking about how to define what is a social network, and what is an addictive game. It’s not that you’re wrong, but you need to think about the execution and making sure that the criteria has a strong basis in principle that can be used to justify the decisions on what to ban. Otherwise you’re just suggesting the impossible

You're right. Defining the criteria for marking an app as harmful might not be straightforward or easy. But we're talking about the education and life of the children. These difficulties shouldn't a preventing factor. Maybe it's easier to allow services and apps one by one when there is a need only. Whatever that's not, let kids have a phone with internet and everything that comes along.

There were plenty of games around when I was a kid, and I’m not convinced they were materially less addictive. But none of them could fit in my pocket or could send me notifications.

Banning phones is simpler, and has no downsides. You are at school to learn, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.

Besides, lots of things can be addictive and distracting. Personally I'm addicted to reading news. Had smartphones existed when I was a kid, simply banning social media and games wouldn't have been enough.

Banning phones has no downsides. You're in the office to work, you don't need a phone or tablet for that.

Well, people do need to reach you and people mostly aren't chained to their desks in an office any longer so you do need a phone of some sort. No, you don't need a tablet in general and I mostly never used one in a professional capacity.

Children vs. adults…

Although many of us adults, myself included, could definitely use a strict break from the screens.

If I didn't have a kid, I wouldn't have a phone at work. It would probably be off in my locker or something.

It's nothing. This study is narrow and shows no changes in cognitive capability, only sleep. A huge longitudinal study has shown screen time has minimal effect on cognitive ability or behavior of kids:

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

There are far worse things in modern culture that are stressing out kids out.

Do you suppose that study is the final word on topic? Replication is an important part of the scientific process, as are converging lines of evidence.

The study I linked covered 12000 kids across demographics. You can dig through studies all you want there is scant evidence to implicate screen time for anything. And yet parents are so utterly convinced.

We are ignoring the obvious which is that children's anxiety and depression is caused by the same things as adults.

It’s only sleep, something that is not related with mental health, adolescents barely need and they already indulge a lot in

This is the same argument people make for not banning guns, and it's a bad argument there too.

I've never lived in a country where carrying gun is allowed and im not much familiar with the topic, so I won't comment on that. But I lived through the time that there was no phone and then when there were phones with non of these junk apps on them and now. This, I believe, makes it very clear, what the real cause of these problems is.

It is certainly a stronger argument in the gun case, since defensive usage significantly outweighs criminal usage and most people don't even shoot anyone. Here we're dealing with a situation where being addicted to your smartphone is the norm, not the exception.

Sounds a good policy but inherently not enforceable. Will end up similar to privacy as there's simply no way to effectively control the offshoots. You ban social networks, they will masquerade it into self-development products. You ban addictive games, they present an argument of socialising, etc...

Sure. That’s why I guess that my teenage pupils are actually researching scientific evidence when I catch them bare handed rubbing their laps.

I give them the benefit of the doubt because it’s not the mobile phone in class what’s damaging, but only very few uses of it

Just ban advertising. Everything follows from the all out war on attention, and ads are its fuel.

I have a pretty libertarian steak, but I do sometimes think that banning advertising in general might be so beneficial for society that it would be worth taking the free speech hit. Not sure how in the hell you enforce it though. "What is an ad?", for example.

One thing I enjoyed when I drove through Incheon and Seoul, Korea, recently was that there were basically no ads/billboards outside.

Define phone. See.

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