When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens | Hacker News Reader

When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens

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101 pointsSLHamlet89 comments

I was a teacher, in both Australia and the UK.

The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years old. (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.) When I was teaching, half of all teachers left the profession within their first five years; I've heard anecdotally that it's 80% now. It's not the clever ones who stay. There's a strong push (often enforced by professional teaching standards) to constantly implement the latest research, which means every teacher has to do the new thing, and is discouraged from thinking about whether it's all bullshit.

One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory, because everything that happens in the computer is just an abstract representation of what happens in the physical world. Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11, which is when children transition from primary school to secondary school in the Australian and British school systems. This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not only does introducing computing too early harm the development of other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...

> (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over and over again.)

I would suppose if you didn't break the rule the same ideas would be reinvented over and over again, but you wouldn't see it

Anecdotally, dunno how much I can get behind this. By 11, I'd learned to touch type and was building virtual houses using one of those consumer CAD programs. My friend was a webmaster and ran a small Pokemon forum. Another friend was producing small musical albums. I'm sure countless SWEs can tell you about their early coding adventures.

The real-world experience came first, of course (a whirlwind house hunt that taught me a lot about style and layouts; an intense interest in the series; an early mastery of the piano, respectively). But, "You're too young," would have represented a frustrating impediment to our curiosity and industry. I faced that anyway, later on ("We can't afford that," to multiple attempts at breaking into CGI), but I know at least the latter friend is a prolific musical artist and virtuoso on several instruments. And I imagine quite a lot of software wouldn't exist, or would be/perform much worse, if the people who made it hadn't had early encounters with - in fact, were shaped by - computing.

I started computer programming at a similar age, but there's a difference between an individual child following their passion at the level of their own abilities, and a classroom teacher trying to develop abstract thinking in 25 or 30 children simultaneously.

There was a great paper I read from the 1950s, where the researcher simply observed a teacher reading a story and asking comprehension questions of the class, who were six years old or so. When the teacher asked a question, all the children raised their hands, but when a child was nominated to answer the question, the children frequently didn't have an answer. They were just raising their hands because it was the socially desirable thing to do; they just wanted to please the teacher. As children grow older, they become more skilled in feigning understanding, and even when teachers do see through the illusion, they often don't have the time in the classroom environment to provide the individual support needed to fix the problem.

> They were just raising their hands because it was the socially desirable thing to do; they just wanted to please the teacher

When I read this sort of thing it reminds me of how some adults didn't seem to take children seriously. My recollection of K-1 is that kids in the class often paid close attention to what was being said by the teacher(s), and were very literal.

If you raised your hand in my kindergarten or first grade classes, it usually meant you had something to say. IIRC kids were pretty good at answering questions as well.

You're making some big jumps here. There's a chasm between the developmental level of 6-year-olds and 11-year-olds. Also, looking at a paper from the 1950s, when, as you say, research in this field is cyclical, seems to suggest that that particular finding wasn't sufficiently replicated. Finally, micro-computer use is inherently an individual task, because the user experience has been designed for individual use. Even with a teacher involved, each child is largely on their own and making their own learning. Young children learn instruments (including their own voice), and participate in both individual and group musical acivities. By your logic, that would be inappropriate, but it not only happens every day, across the country, but is the source of quite a few musical artists' later success.

I think, if anything, the key might be in the expertise educators have with the given instrument. Most music instructors are talented musicians or vocalists themselves, and I imagine most have a keen sense for how to encourage proper care of both the student and their tool. Maybe it'e changed, but most of the teachers I had growing up that were involved with computer use were largely trained in library sciences. I don't know that there even IS any effective deep training wrt computer use. It's not just that the technology is new, but also that most experts are going to be coming from a tech industry whose modus operandi is purposely cultivating unhealthy relationship with their products.

"The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years old."

Just to confirm, did you really mean to say MORE than ten years old or did you mean LESS?

There's no typo there, what I typed is what we were told. There's a genuine belief that research expires after ten years in educational psychology (and possibly other human sciences). It was a sharp contrast to my major in physics, in which the first year was almost exclusively ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

> One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory, because everything that happens in the computer is just an abstract representation of what happens in the physical world. Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11, which is when children transition from primary school to secondary school in the Australian and British school systems. This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not only does introducing computing too early harm the development of other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing.

Bear in mind approximately none of his claims have been experimentally validated, and my experience (and I suspect that of many other HN users) is the opposite.

Article on one possible effect of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbie...

This sort of thing is one argument for why northern European countries still have Sloyd woodworking in schools:

https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...

>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.

Similarly, Maria Montessori's instruction method still seems valid --- interestingly, the blocks were described by one woodworker I knew as quite challenging to make because of the solid/density requirement and the overall size of the largest block.

That said, why not extend touchscreens into the real world as was done with early versions of Logo?

https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/histor...

Montessori is great. Highly recommend it. In later years students get access to devices in the one I'm familiar with, but in the early formative years they still use the same old-school materials for learning shapes, objects, quantities, math, etc.

They also teach cursive. The head of curriculum talks about how it unlocks different neural pathways. There was recent research that confirmed this.

Went through Montessori growing up. Agree on this.

3 1/2 years of it myself (all they offered at the time), missed half a year (that half year was very educational but not in the formal sense, I do believe my parents made the right choice), returned to 5th grade at to well above grade level.

I have never studied why it was considered superior, only that it was.

“They also teach cursive. The head of curriculum talks about how it unlocks different neural pathways. There was recent research that confirmed this.”

Doesn’t all learning? This sounds like bullshit.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7399101/

My kid's favourite toys were wooden blocks their grandpa made.

Just 2x2" wood stock, cut into 2x2x2 and 2x2x4 cubes and sanded down.

They became houses, roads, furniture and whatever. Some got painted.

Parents _think_ kids need a bunch of fancy toys, but they really don't. They just need (literally) the building blocks of toys. Wood blocks, Lego (the old kind with square bricks, not the new ones where every piece is different).

> Lego (the old kind with square bricks, not the new ones where every piece is different).

I think Lego has cut back on strange almost unusable bricks lately? Or atleast those Bionicle type sets get less store space where I live.

Seems to be the case.

Poster child for this would be the Space Shuttle/747 kit (which I kind of wish had gone back to the drawing board for a few more revisions.... but I'll probably get it anyway).

For what it's worth, in the late 80s/early 90s Nordic schools did include Logo in the curriculum. I never saw a physical Logo turtle, but we programmed to move one on screen.

People reason that if a skill is important, people need to become good at it, and becoming good requires starting early in life. This reasoning isn't valid for computer use, and I have an anecdote to illustrate why.

When the internet was yet fairly new, I was assigned to teach basic computer use to a class of Saudi Arabian soldiers. Many of these guys were fresh out of the desert, some even still adjusting to the idea of wearing shoes. They had no idea what to do when placed in front of a computer. Imagine if your dog got up on its hind legs, rested its paws on the keyboard, and poked its nose at the screen. To cut the story short, I led them through this and that and by the end of a month, they certainly couldn't touch-type, but they were designing their own web pages. They were so enthusiastic that they were sneaking into the lab after hours (evidently to search online for pics of naked ladies).

My point is that computer interfaces are designed to be simple and intuitive, so you don't need an early start to practice like you do with a highly complex task like playing a musical instrument. There is really no developmental benefit to early screen use.

That's an interesting thought experiment. Counter-anecdote: My grandmother has been using computers in some capacity or another since the 1980s. And she is still, by most definitions, completely and utterly "computer illiterate."

Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not possible. So she calls her relatives to help her with the most basic of task ... and this has been going on for 40-50 years of her life.

I wonder if she had been introduced to computers younger in life if that fear of breaking things could have been overcome and replaced by a curiosity and enthusiasm to explore the digital space.

I'm also open the possibility that this fear is a personality trait and impacts her in other areas of life as well. We are just trading anecdotes after all ;)

Maybe it's just not as useful to her so she doesn't bother learning?

Possibly but I would expect her to use computers a lot less if that were the case. She is an Apple user - probably for the best since she doesn't want configurability and values consistency and predictability and everything being interoperable. But she upgrades regularly and, until her eye sight started to physically hinder her ability to read emails and perform tasks on a computer, she used them quite a bit for if it were a matter of "I just don't need this thing."

To add context: she was a public school educator. Began as a teacher, was actually my school Principal in grade one. So she had a need for computers in her professional life and continued to use them in her personal despite tons of evidence that she has no idea how lol

Would she have been a better principal or teacher had she been better at using her computer than she is. If apple works well enough for her then that's the point isn't it? That picking up what you need isn't hard and you can do it even if you have little interest in doing so.

I have many colleagues in the humanities who are the same, even though they have been heavy users of personal computers since the beginning. They seem to just reject retaining detailed operational knowledge. This seems to be distinct from the issue of becoming comfortable with interfaces.

I've found that the most valuable skill when using a computer is the willingness to fiddle with settings and see what they do and what works, paired with an intuition for which settings are likely to break things in a way that's extremely painful to fix.

> Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not possible.

It's a mindset thing. My grandfather was a tinkerer by nature and he was the type to wander into C:\Windows and just start deleting crap "because it took up so much space" :D

He was used to opening things and fixing them if they broke, but kinda lacked the mental model to fix a computer.

Taught me a lot, when I was the one who had to fix his adventures =)

As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his own shoes.

When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.

> they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.

I'm really curious what people mean when they say that. I didn't grow up with smart screens, but I've never felt particularly encumbered by them, and I wouldn't even consider using them a skill. What does the difference between a "bad iPad user" and a "good iPad user" really amount to? Is swiping Tiktok and watching Youtube really something you can become proficient in?

Finding how to change a specific setting on your iPad/iPhone, etc.

How is it any different than being proficient with a regular computer? Or any other tool? They're fast at typing, they know where the settings are, they can get around using muscle memory instead of needing to examine every screen to see where things are, etc etc.

Regular computers have less handrails and you can hose yourself.

Back in the day even a 12 year old needed to at least sometimes poke around autoexec.bat so some understanding as to why things are happening was necessary.

In gaming, there's the terms "skill floor" and "skill ceiling" to describe a game's capacity for handling user adeptness. A low skill floor means anyone can play with low requirements, and a high skill floor means it demands a lot from the player. Low skill ceiling means that it takes very little time to reach the peak skill level, while a high skill ceiling means it can take years of play before taking full advantage of the tools it gives you.

Tablets seem to have a low skill floor and low skill ceiling by design. There's no file system, they can't run unsigned code, they can't write code, and are essentially just internet media players.

A PC has a somewhat low skill floor as well (as any mass consumer product should), but the skill ceiling is very very high. A confident user can also easily break something essential.

I have been using an iPad for years and every fucking time I accidentally trigger the creation of a second window I have to flail around for a while before I can figure out how to get rid of it. Presumably there are people who deliberately create multiple windows on these things and actually do serious enough work on them that this is useful, "my experiences with trying to ditch my lappy for 100% ipad" is definitely a genre of blog post.

You can disable this in the settings.

You can? Last time I looked you could not. I hate it so much. Where do I go to turn it off?

Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking > Allow Multiple Apps = “off”.

I don't have a "multitasking" section in "home screen & dock". Possibly because I have an old ipad that constantly fails to update past 15.7 for some damn reason. Guess I get to keep cursing this feature.

Interesting take. My son is in this summer right now. He can’t tie his shoes yet but can whistle pretty well. My passing theory on shoes, as opposed to my 80s experience, is twofold. First, the end of unstructured/unsupervised play outside means he’s rarely/never been in a circumstance where an adult hasn’t been near enough to tie them for him. Second, has to do with shoes themselves. I feel like no tie/velcro shoes didn’t exist past toddler sizes when I was young. Maybe they did but I’m sure they were severely limiting compared to the options available today. He’s even been using the pre-tied elastic laces for last year or more, I don’t remember those at all when I was a kid. I remember Velcro was a something a bully might target you for so most kids wanted out of them asap back then.

His need of this skill is lower than mine.

Another example is bike riding. I was all over my neighborhood by first grade and BMX was a dominant hobby. My son has practically zero interest in even learning how to ride. There’s no FOMO of his friends leaving him in the dust like when I was a kid.

I'm not saying the thesis here is wrong - it definitely feels directionally correct. But I always wonder with these panics about children's development - do we actually know that developing certain types of skills at certain periods is critical, in the long run?

I think about this often with my own kid. He was behind on speech milestones. I looked up outcomes for kids behind on speech milestones. Data shows that early intervention seems to help speech/reading skills into early elementary school. But there was very little data on the longer term outcomes. Does speech therapy when you're 2 or 3 years old really impact your career or lifetime earnings? Seems like it might for kids with true developmental/learning disabilities. But everyone else?

As our pediatrician often says "[Outside of severe disability] Nobody goes off to college needing their mommy to sleep, or being unable to use a fork".

At least this one is not. I've broken my dominant hand before and then separated the same shoulder, both in the same year, and was surprised to find using scissors to be the single most difficult thing to do with my non-dominant hand, other than writing. It took a few months to get it right, but that's it. Not like it's a lifelong deficiency. You just learn later. Presumably, kids with their inherently more plastic neuromuscular systems learn faster than a 44 year-old, too.

It's because scissors are actually made for use in one hand or the other. Most are made for right-handed people. If you're left-handed (or forced to use your left hand), get scissors made for left-handed people and they will be easier to use.

How many industry leaders do you know with speech impediments? And, no, these impediments don't usually vanish over time -- I come from a large family (8 kids), and one of my youngest sisters was allowed to "grow out" of her inability to pronounce 's' and 'r' -- but it never happened, and she required speech therapy at 20. She still struggles. Parents are correct to pay attention to young-childhood milestones.

Reaching college without being able to use a screwdriver is a problem I've heard mentioned by a mechanical engineering professor.

General Motors runs new hires through basic training for an assembly line, with a dummy assembly line and wooden car mockups.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1XVgGT4Eqo

>But I always wonder with these panics about children's development

The panics are definitely overblown, if not entirely wrong... soon, there won't be (m)any children to worry about, and then the human race becomes extinct (or maybe just feral). A glorious future awaits.

Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself. Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to the other side. It's Chesterton's fence not Chesterton's infinite fucking barrier.

Theres a reason it's called chesterson's fence. Not chesterson's law.

It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right.

I've never seen somebody propose it as a formal debate concept- but rather a perspective in which to enter the debate.

> It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right.

I think you have that exactly backwards. Meaning... the "prop" would be to assume the fence-builder was right, not wrong, and you need to find the why before you can remove the obviously-dumb-thing-with-visible-no-purpose.

I'm sure you're beyond me here, but not quite following. He's not using the argument himself he's saying this is a situation in which people are removing "the fence" (replacing scissor-and-crayon time with tablets) without asking why it was there (establishing fine motor skills).

It's clouded here because the article knows why the fence is there. Specifically - the fence (scissors, drawing, coloring) are tools we use in primary school to strengthen the childrens' hands and strengthen their fine motor skills.

When they're older and attempting to write a long essay they don't get muscle cramps and break their concentration. Instead, they... simply write. We don't hand-write anymore but we also no longer have the

yeah, chesterton's fence has fully crossed the line from useful rhetorical tool to frequently mis-applied aphorism.

don't remove the fence until you know why it was built is a simple, useful thought experiment. but it doesn't mean "don't remove the fence until you know about every single side effect that it could possibly have had since it was built, including things the builder could never have possibly imagined, and fully accounted for the consequences of each of those effects."

if you sell the bull in chesterton's field, then you can tear down chesterton's fence. whether or not that lets the coyotes access the neighbour's chickens isn't part of the metaphor.

If you built the fence to contain the bull then clearly you have removed the reason. It's not a Chesterton's Fence. Chesterton's Fence is about things that have no apparent purpose--because an awful lot of such things have a purpose that's not obvious.

That's the argument. In my experience most of the time the supposed purpose is a lucky coincidence or outright detrimental.

The quote in the article seems to come from nowhere. It’s not in the post they link, and Google doesn’t find it. I went looking because I was uncomfortable with the way Chesterton’s Fence was being used here: it’s not supposed to be “that fence is important!” It’s supposed to be “that fence may be important, and until you know whether it is or not, leave it up.” I’ve probably written a lot of code that looks like a fence across a road, and I would hate to think everyone I ever worked with is leaving it up regardless of whether it’s still useful.

In this case I happen to agree with the author’s premise: it seems clear that kids have a developmental need to interact with the world physically. But I’m not comfortable with a made-up blockquote that slightly twists the meaning of the original parable.

ETA: I’m not accusing the author of the Medium article of fabricating their quote; their source may have changed in the interim. I’m just saying someone made up this story, there’s no apparent source for it, and it’s not a good representation of the principle it purportedly explains.

The author is claiming he knows why the fence was built, but now we've torn it down, which is not the normal way of using the CF idiom... but... doesn't mean it's not a reasonable usage.

The article mentions tying shoelaces.

If you have a kid who hasn't yet learned how to tie their shoelaces, you might find this video helpful: https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY

It shows a method called the 'Ian Knot', which:

- results in the same type of knot as the common method, and

- is faster because it requires fewer hand movements, and

- is as easy to learn as the common method (for kids learning from scratch)

When adults encounter it, they usually think it seems hard, but that's just because they're used to the method they've used thousands of times. It's not really harder to learn!

BTW I'm pretty sure I learned about the Ian Knot here on HN. It's been posted a bunch of times. The first few times I saw it, I just bookmarked it for later. But when it was time to teach my son, I figured I should use the best method.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Oh yeah, I think learned about the 'Ian knot' on hn as well, though I use the secure variant: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

I didn't know about this knot, but I'm pretty sure I tried it when I was kid, messing around with different ways to tie laces.

I tried it just now, and it's indeed very secure.

I almost always wear sneakers, and don't have any problem with laces getting untied, so I'll stick with the Ian Knot.

I will suggest this secure knot to my son, though.

Ian Knot is fast, but IMO (well, I preferred it when I was in kindergarten) easiest to learn for a child is Two loop knot.

[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm

Yes, for 35+ years I used that knot. For most of that time I didn't know why my loops were always crooked. Then I read about the granny knot, and started reversing my first knot.

The standard/common way has the advantage of it being the easiest to maintain and control tension on the starter knot as you tie it, which is probably why it became the standard.

Schools now giving Chromebooks to Kindergarteners is some crazy unintentional dystopian shit.

"They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on."

!!!

If you think those kids will ever type a password in their life, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I'd say what they are being taught is very relevant to their future.

The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years. Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and their existence can be wiped away by trend/market making/capitalism.

Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all come to accept that developing more neural pathways is important and "smooth brain" is bad

What exactly is dystopian about it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

From the actual Education Week post referenced in the above

"Experts say [difficulties using scissors and pencils, and social-emotional capabilities, such as following instructions and sharing] is likely in part a function of the upheaval caused by the pandemic—and that even students who weren’t in grade school during the height of school closures are still experiencing the lingering effects."

So the first piece of "evidence" cited actually discusses a whole range of behavioral issues -- not just the inability to use scissors and stack blocks or whatever -- and that these issues were triggered by the pandemic and its continued aftershocks -- not tOo mUcH TOuCHscEEnZ 'n tEchNoLoGee

Respect to the medium author's academic credentials and achievements but their post is a classic "first subscribe to my thinly justified POV then buy into my cult I mean product line" sales pitch that can only make correct decent arguments by accidental alignment to convenient data points.

> “It’s like they’ve never seen a block,” says Hornbeck, an instructional coach at Beverly City Public Schools in New Jersey, describing how kids fumble when asked to stack just three blocks. “The things they do with the block when you’ve just shown them what to do is boggling.”

Whenever I see quotes about "kids these days can't do X", I'm always skeptical.

You remember the kids in your class that were just absolutely, indefensibly stupid? These quotes are probably talking about those specific kids. I seriously doubt out of a class of 30 kids, all 30 of them couldn't stack the blocks. It was probably the 5 kids in the class that are just stupid, and every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will.

Maybe the proportion of “stupid” kids is increasing due to phone use altering cognitive development?

I don’t know if that’s true or not but it is worth thinking about.

Especially since apparently Big Tech executives and top engineers are very strict regarding technology use in their children. And very strict regarding screen time.

Reminiscent of how tobacco executives would not let their kids smoke while suppressing data regarding lung cancer.

> every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will

Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. And current technology could make this time longer.

> Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn.

Isn't that the definition of stupid, someone who needs more time than average to learn. While smart would be someone who needs less time than average to learn.

That seems a little reductive to me, since "needs more time" could mean many different things, ex:

1. (Overall rate) From the same starting-point, this child will always require 2x the time/effort to learn than expected.

2. (Overall offset) This child's thresholds for becoming able to learn many skills at the normal rate tends to be 6 months later than expected.

3. (Specific rates) For a particular task this child learned slowly no matter how old they were.

4. (Specific offsets) For a particular task this child learned slowly, but when stopped trying and revisited it X months later they had no problems.

Of those, it sounds like you're assuming the harshest, first version.

I'm no child developmental psychologist, but I'd wager that versions 2,3,4 are more frequent than most people would assume, since they take more work to distinguish and the universe tends to be messy.

For better or worse they did actually cite statistics:

> 77 percent of educators reported young students having greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying shoes compared to five years ago.

But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years.

That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.

> But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years.

Oh no, there are for sure more people now who think things are worse vs 5 years ago than there were 5 years ago.

I would also have to wonder how much of that is the supposed general 'manual dexterity' problem, and how much is just greater unfamiliarity with those specific items because they're no longer immediately using them every day. I certainly know that my own ability to hand-write for long periods dropped off hard once I got out of high school and shifted into typing almost everything.

Well, there's a huge difference between having 5/30 kids being intensely stupid vs. 6/30 in the average kindergarten. That is catastrophically bad.

Objectively, how important are those lost skills?

I don't disagree that fine motor skills are important, but I don't know for sure if they are still needed like they used to be.

Skills needed for daily life change as culture develops.

Fine motor skills in a broad sense are building block skills, just like reading(which is also declining). It opens up the opportunity for learning more complex skills. Unless we want to go the route of being 100% automated pampering content consumers like in Wall-E, we should keep up the baseline skills.

I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life.

I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills. The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process internalize that they're capable of doing so.

If you want to just extirpate things like music and art then yeah, it's fine if nobody knows how to use their fingers.

Those who need fine motor skills can still learn them.

It’s kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts of it are strong.

So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn.

Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.

With my kids, one of my main priorities was just making sure they knew that things were available and possible. Even if they never got into drawing or painting, we did them to show that painting or woodworking weren't some mysterious process. If you never do things with your hands, you won't have those potential areas of expression available to you.

Just in case the page is (intentionally) broken for anyone else:

https://archive.ph/aHpVv

Last 20 years or so seem to be a track record of people coordinating to make voluntarily bad decisions with technology:

- social media

- chromebooks in school

- smartphones

- the attention economy

- llms

- etc

None of these were inevitable, and in principle all are reversible. But, we're all trapped by the tyranny of the majority. It feels like it will continue to get worse.

It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare at the screen and consume.

Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc

Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you arguably could have done better with better activities)

That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to be made influencing people to act against their own best interests.

Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now- will make people jobless?

There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what they had in mind.

Yeah, but think how great their planer surface manipulation will be later in life. /s

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