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Comment by HeinzStuckeIt | Hacker News Reader

> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school

What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.

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The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.

The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.

But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.

That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.

It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.

What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.

Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.

That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.

Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?

Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.

The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.

Worst case you can switch jobs. It's not easy, but it's a lot easier than switching schools.

Also, bullying in school has no consequences, but outside it might have some.

Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.

I think the user means that bullies in school face little consequences, but a bully at work may get called by HR and potentially disciplined.

Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.

It's way easier to change workplace than to change school, so I don't think it can get so extreme.

With a workplace if you can gather evidence and document it there's a significant chance of a lawsuit with a payout.

Schools are generally protected against that, and your only hope is to replace the school board, who is commonly bullies themselves.

Yep, so HR people occasionally learn a hard lesson when they don't do their job to cover for their friends.

No consequence for the bully I mean.

I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom.

All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.

I think age cohortand school makes a difference. Personally I had a perfectly fine time in highschool, most people just got along. Same problems as other posters though, it's just anecdote, and a heavily biased sampling (pretty decent chunk of CS people with poor social skills)

I had a terrible time in Canadian jr high and great time in American high school. I think it really just depends on the school

PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".

>What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson.

valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.

a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.

Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.

The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.

Heh, we were at a family reunion with my grandparents in-laws talking about school. The topic of bullies was brought up and grandma said "Oh there were no problems with bullies" and I replied "thats because you were the bully.

Grandpa laughed heartily, as I may have hit a bullseye

Avoidance: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.

The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.

That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.

I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.

I think USA does everything later than in other countries.

So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.

It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the world.

I've had plenty of friends I've only known through the internet and a chat room. It's not the same as being in-person - I don't see a way to reliably turn out healthy adults unless kids talk to each other.

The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.

I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.

I don't think they're reframing. They weren't bullied or were the bullies themselves.

Or there simply weren’t any bullies.

Not everybody’s childhood played out like Lord of the Flies.

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