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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

"teach kids how to use technology responsibly"

I teach a code club. I try to get the students excited and focused, and especially on projects where they work together, it generally works really well, even for students who obviously aren't quite 'into it'.

But at absolutely any opportunity where they are not focused (and there's always someone) they try to play roblox or other games. They try to have it running in the background and switch. And even installed a workspace switcher so it wasn't obvious they had game windows open.

It's really like highly addictive drugs. For kids, at least, the best solution is to make them unavailable while they are supposed to be learning.

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This is now going on in college. I was just hearing from a professor the other day that it's impossible to keep students off of social media. They cannot sit for a 50 minute lecture without pulling out their phones (that's if they even physically come to class; if they're online, they are half-listening at best).

These are now the COVID lockdown and post-pandemic kids. They come in to college unprepared/lacking mastery of prerequisites, don't listen in class, they don't come to office hours, they don't do their homework (or try to have ChatGPT do it) and get upset when they fail.

Except the great part about college is you don’t need to pander to students and their parents.

Can’t keep up with the class because you’re distracted on your phone? Not the teachers problem! Good luck on the test lol. You’re paying for the class either way…

It’s different if a student is earnestly trying to focus on the material, showing up to office hours, etc.

Offline-first teaching! Let them only be able to read docs available to them

This is because they like playing Roblox, and are getting something out of playing Roblox, and are not persuaded that your thing is more rewarding for them, and unless you can pull a miracle of engaging enthusiasm out of the bag they're right.

So if they take crack cocaine instead of literature class, they're right too?

Sorry, but learning is actually a slog. The best we can do is get them addicted to learning, instead of gaming, but let's help them on the way by removing the gaming temptation while they are in class.

Learning is not a slog. Cramming for exams, that's a slog, but only tenuously relates to learning.

OK, so sometimes a person may get all fired up about a project and slog through reams of - effort - in order to get some stage done, out of a deep desire to see what happens next. And from an external perspective that seems very worthy because it seems deeper than something that's just constantly rewarding. But is it necessary, proper, that any given person be doing such a deep and onerous thing all the time? Or even very often? Is it for the external observer, who knows nothing of the person's internal processes and feelings, to decide these things? Mind your own beeswax.

Crack doesn't count, IMO, because it games the system. Probably now you'll say something to compare Roblox unironically to crack "because dopamine". Did you know, we get dopamine released when doing anything we enjoy? But there's always a lot of people ready to claim that electronic devices are literally addictive, because it's a trendy thing to say, and the pressure of this opinion is like a physical force, a great gaseous mass of idiots. I shouldn't have got involved with this conversation, I have important video games to play.

I very much agree that learning is not a slog, and its sad that people are educated in ways that leaves them believing that learning has to be a slog.

Where I disagree with you is that I do think it is true that some things are addictive and are designed to be addictive (social media is), but its the things people do on devices that are addictive, not the devices themselves.

I agree "dopamine release" is not a bad thing per se, but when businesses hire psychologists to figure out how to get people to spend more time on their app people are being manipulated in a disturbing way.

Edit - inserted missing "not"

> is a bad thing

I'll take that as "is not a bad thing."

One point about manipulative attempts to increase engagement is that they only have to apply statistically, that is, increase total engagement. Another point is that people just enjoy doing dumb things to relax. It's then offensive (to me, too!) that businesses exploit this to promote things. But it's not disturbing if somebody is really into, say, jigsaw puzzles. We don't claim Ravensburger is hacking people's brains with their carefully designed colorful and complex pictures that draw you in and keep you playing. That's because Ravensburger are not a bunch of sinister jerks, which is the real issue. But the brain-hacking capacity of infinite phone videos isn't any more real than that of the jigsaws.

I'll take that as "is not a bad thing."

Yes, and I have now edited it. Thank you.

> not a bunch of sinister jerks, which is the real issue.

I agree with this.

> But the brain-hacking capacity of infinite phone videos isn't any more real than that of the jigsaws.

I am not sure about this, and I am convinced that some things (e.g. social media) do have greater brain-hacking capacity.

Some learning is a slog. We have to go through it because it's required to understand the thing we really want to learn about. And we don't appreciate that until we're on the other side. The teacher/professor can say "you need to understand this, even though it's not obviously applicable yet, just trust me" and that is the part you have to slog through but you eventually see the point.

Other stuff we slog through just because we've decided it makes a student well-rounded. I like reading fiction, but I never liked reading "literature" and then trying to write an analysis of it. It was absolutely a slog, and even 40 years later I cannot see that my life is any worse off because I never loved reading Homer or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Tolstoy.

I recognize what you're talking about, from mathematics. But you're either being genuinely interested, in which case it's a delightful slog that you're keen on, or else (more commonly) you're being perversely stubborn for external reasons like prestige. In the latter case it's a sort of perverse-learning that isn't really worthy of the name, and although it's somewhat more sophisticated than rote memorization, the understanding is shallow and short-lived. I used to hate mathematics, so I did six years of pure mathematics, and now I really hate it.

I was reading parts of the Iliad for fun recently, on the other hand, because somebody had asked a question, and I enjoy slogging through dense texts to find obscure facts. It's horribly written because names are frequently oblique, like "the old one" or "son of ..." instead of an actual name, and everybody talks in flowery speeches. Shakespeare suffers from the flowery speeches thing too. Beowulf is also tedious to read because of all the kennings (talking in riddles). Chaucer on the other hand is sometimes dirty and amusing. Tolstoy, never tried. Gilgamesh, though, is well-written, fast-paced and highly entertaining, I reckon literature should probably have stopped there, all the authors after that were just derivative hacks.

But in summary it depends what you're into.

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