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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

This is beyond silly.

You could be using your phone to factcheck something that relates to the ongoing discussion. Or having a side-chat with another member, privately expressing/requesting an opinion to provide context. Or to take quick notes. Or, nowadays, you might even be using an AI to keep a running summary of what the speaker has been rambling about in the last 50 minutes, translated from 'buzzspeak' to 'humanspeak'. All legit uses of technology, which enhance the politician's attention rather than detract from it.

I'm not saying I'm having a hard time believing people 'could' be checking out 9gag instead during parliament, but unless you give me an AI that can detect people who are on their phone AND verified to be slagging off, then you're just bullying people for having phones and being able to use them.

Also, I like how laptops are somehow exempt from this bullying for some magical reason.

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Even if they're not paying attention it's likely a "this issue is not a me issue, I'm gonna re-read my notes or the summary memo for the next me issue" situation.

People don't generally slack of when a legislative body has a hearing. That's basically their "game day".

Angry Birds high scores won't outscore themselves!!

Angela Merkel was known to text during parliamentary sessions, sometimes with multiple phones, with colleagues about the ongoing debate.

Other anecdota: Nowadays it is only part of Green Party folklore from the past, but to knit in political sessions was a common sight. What is not so silly but just stupid is conservative delegates watching football during a sex work debate (2018, https://twitter.com/BoehmeMarco/status/1012001444302598146). In German Bundestag, parliamentary rules forbid to photograph "personal documents" (including phones and tablets) in a way that the content is recognizable.

> Angela Merkel was known to text during parliamentary sessions, sometimes with multiple phones, with colleagues about the ongoing debate.

Legislative / collective council discussion has probably always had some sort of quieter back channel discussion. The low tech solution might be a whispered conversation, or might be conducted via pages/runners when decorum puts moving around the room out of reach.

Mobile devices mean you can use technology instead of runners.

> sometimes with multiple phones

Reminds me of movies where le epic haxxor starts typing on two keyboards at once.

Anyway, if everybody's vote is a foregone conclusion and the debate is only for the sake of the process, I can't find fault with people getting bored and tuning out.

I agree with you, but this doesn't mean this data is useless.

You could could count how many people are using their phones by speaker.

"When Alice speaks 18% of the members use their phones for more than 15 minutes, but when Bob speaks the rate is 27%." could be a proxy to understand how important the parliament thinks the subject/speaker is.

This project doesn't seem to collect data, it posts the photo from the stream to social media and tags the politician. You might be able to derive the data you're talking about from the social media posts and timestamps, but that is obviously not the primary purpose.

The notion that you must have your phone away and be giving all your attention to a speaker is so antiquated and worthless.

I have issues with auditory processing and attention. If you deliver information to me verbally in a format where I cannot rewind/playback, have no subtitles or text to consume alongside it, and demand my full attention, I will have objectively worse reception of whatever information you're communicating. The way neurotypicals demand adherence to these, to be blunt, ceremonies of conveyance is tiresome and interferes with the goals they espouse of communication.

In fact I would go so far as to say a lot of the time, the goal is not communication at all; it is a demonstration of one's power and authority over others. If your goal is actually communication, text is better in every way. Every reader can read at a speed of their choosing, re-read parts they missed, have a speech-to-text program read it to them if they like, stop in the middle and tend to something time sensitive, what have you. A live speech allows none of this.

So yes, I probably use my phone while you're talking. I probably have my AirPods in too, because the settings where they remove background noise and just give me the person speaking are phenomenally useful. I might even be watching or having my phone transcribe what you're saying, too. And if you're going to try and chastise me for it, fine, that's your prerogative, but then I'm probably starting a job search for a place that will appreciate my skills and not demean me for not being able to perform "good worker vibes" to your arbitrary standards.

Being able to focus in a speech it's not arbitrary at all.

Preventing others from using tools that help them focus because you are in a position of power to determine what "focus" looks like is exactly the point the parent comment was making.

"Being able to focus on a speech" looks different for differently-abled people. Just because it doesn't look like focus to you doesn't mean you or anyone else should get to dictate the tools I or anyone else use to enhance our focus control.

Different people have different needs in order to focus fully on something. It reeks of entitlement to look at another person and decide how they get to manage their focus.

I think you stated this a bit better than I did, and certainly more concisely. It's immensely frustrating and exhausting to have to constantly defend myself against accusations of not being attentive enough, not being responsive enough, not "looking like I work hard" enough.

If you want someone who looks and runs about like a good little office bee, then I'm (quite evidently) not your girl. That said if you want your jobs handled on-time, to spec and beyond, and with care and consideration for the end users, that's me.

So you will find that a minority opposition person will have less attention than a leading person on the government side?

This is beyond silly.

You could be using your phone to to find a hooker for tonight. A legit uses of technology. Normally they use their iPads for that though.

And you can use your iPad or computer to check Facebook

I was actually citing a real world example ... but yes there is also prior art of people browsing facebook on a bunch of devices.

> This is beyond silly. You could be using your phone to [...]

I think you think the benefit of such a tool would be to shame politicians for something specific, whereas the real benefit of such a tool would be to make decision-makers aware that unchecked AI video scoring and facial recognition has implications far beyond the obviously controllable.

A nose picking score would be just as useful. But it would be more vulgar.

You call it silly because you could be doing useful stuff on your phone. I'd go one step further and say that even if you're slacking off that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody, including politicians, slacks off from time to time. Be it due to stress, awful sleep because the neighbor's dog barked all night, illness, or something else. It's just human and there's little wrong with it as long as you do your job well most of the time.

You're being downvoted, but I agree with you.

I obviously don't want politicians to be habitually slacking off, but everyone has good days and bad days. There are days where I spend half my time on HN instead of working (hello today), but I typically make up for it shortly afterwards by having a super productive day. The important fact is that, on average, I'm productive and deliver on my job duties.

Politicians should absolutely be held accountable, it's an important job, but I don't think they should be held to standards that we hold no one else to.

Which has me wondering if the entire point is to make the politicians critically aware of how absurd AI performance monitoring isn't as innocuous as those selling it to the politicians will make it out to be.

> I'd go one step further and say that even if you're slacking off that's not necessarily a bad thing

While I agree, the legislation that the politicians passed says the opposite it true.

Also, it ignores that perhaps sometimes slacking off (or perhaps better "taking a break") may be a good thing.

If only we could just cut off their access to Twitter/X ...

I’ll never tire of “good people“ complaining that they can’t censor speech enough.

I'd be ok with it if the speech was anonymized in some way.

Remember that many forms of "free speech" are pretty shitty, for example ads. Also, "free speech" does not mean "free amplification of speech".

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