The Dopamine Trap | Hacker News Reader

The Dopamine Trap

midwesterndoctor.com

26 pointsda0221 comments

Spot on. Giving kids a smartphone and unsupervised access to algorithm driven content is child abuse, though sadly a legal form of it. Also, model the behavior you want to see, so put your own phone down around kids and let them see you pursue interests other than scrolling on a small rectangle.

If you need kids distracted for a while, at least take take the time to thoughtfully pick out some books or physical media like DVDs they can enjoy ad-free with dedicated offline media players, or give them a mechanical puzzle, or a yo-yo, or legos, or paper and crayons.

Neglectful; sure. Child abuse; hardly. Please let’s not degrade the meaning of child abuse; it’s detrimental.

These same arguments were put in front of the public when TV was released. A steady stream of boob-tube content was seen as a detriment to society and many questioned it. But now we have a new wave of technology that parents are using to placate their children to avoid the challenges present in parenting today, just as they did 70+ years ago, but now we’re saying things like, “we’re taking away their smartphones and putting them in front of TV content we grew up with!”

I am not advocating parents plop their kids in front of devices of any kind, but to argue it’s abuse is absurd. And furthermore, to claim that TV shows prevalent in the 80s and 90s are somehow an acceptable proxy is almost as absurd.

Knowingly giving a child poison known to cause lasting damage to their brain sounds pretty abusive to me. It is the modern day equivalent of putting whiskey in the bottle to calm a kid down.

Also it is not about 80s/90s content so much as it is about helping a kid develop a longer attention span. Give them things worth watching more than 10 seconds at a time, or puzzles and project kits worth playing with for hours.

The difference is- the producers of shows such as Mister Rogers and Sesame Street did not have a profit motive to increase "engagement" numbers. They actually used psychology to try and improve the outcomes of their viewers (aka children) rather than trying to improve the outcomes of themselves.

I mean, watch CoComelon and Sesame Street (or Mister Rogers, or Daniel Tiger...) side by side and tell me there isn't a qualitative difference between the two.

You’re being purposefully obtuse by indirectly saying that TV of the past is somehow ok, when previous generations argued much the same against it.

So... because we believe now that the moral panic around TV was unfounded, that directly implies there could be no concerns about the impact of consuming large amounts of algorithmically generated "junk content" by young developing brains?

Then, if that's the case, put your kids where your mouth is, go buck wild and sit your kids in front of CoComelon all day.

Let’s talk in 70y.

TV of the past is not okay, especially not in excessive amounts. But I too have noticed that shows from that era tend to be less fast-paced than those of today, so it's probably less harmful.

oh no!, some tedious beurocratic "legal" definition of child abuse would have to be amended, and therby threaten certain agencies who consider child abuse to be under there sole, authority. Children are dying, and bieng lured into any and all ilegal activities, the main platforms are targeting children for every reason, but with pictures of puppys and buterfly's and sing song characters that then segue into the darkest corners of the internet, 3 redirects away, any time, anywhere

While this article looks insightful and mostly fact-based, the source is suspicious as it has at least one highly conspirological antivax post: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-much-damage-has-mass-...

Half way through the mask seems to slip and it was the vaccines all along.

It seems very pseudoscientific, within one or two sentences it's already veering into fringe material.

Title correction: The Hidden Dopamine Trap

This article goes from pretty agreeable content to 'vaccines did it' so fast I have whiplash. Please tell me I'm reading this wrong.

> Key implications:

> 2. After the DPT vaccine entered the population, neurological and behavioral issues rippled through society. In the 1950s, “minimal brain damage“ [MBD] was coined, with hyperactivity as its defining characteristic. MBD symptoms overlap significantly with encephalitis, DPT injuries, and autism. Eventually, they found it could be “treated” with stimulants, and the disorder was renamed ADHD.

> 3. I suspect something similar is happening with screens—their dopamine-releasing nature is being used to counteract behavioral disturbances in vaccine-injured children. Many parents lacking bandwidth to handle misbehaving children are forced to provide addictive technology, transforming children into lifelong users.

I'm instantly suspicious of anything online that uses the "dopamine" buzzword. The name of the neurotransmitter seems to just be used to mean "good feeling" so the grifter writing the article can make their self help content or specious moralising sound scientific

what I love is the people on this very site who will downvote you and call you a bad parent for fighting this tooth and nail with your own kids.

I have never sat my kids down with some stupid YouTube channel like CoComelon -- or any YouTube channel for that matter -- yet I am at the mercy of the same strong market forces that make that style of content popular. As a result I have the same issues with emotional disregulation related to screen time with one of my children (the other two handle it mostly OK).

So now, just like everything else it seems, the parents are left alone to try and fight this battle with trillion dollar corporations all by themselves. Yes, some parents have given up and willfully handed their kids' future to these sociopaths. But I assure you there are millions of us who are left in a David vs Goliath fight with no end in sight.

We banned proprietary software in our home, self host the internet services we need and want as a family, and block ads in everything.

Gave up my own phone entirely a few years ago partly to ensure kids never see me use one or rely on one so they know such tools are optional in life.

I like teaching kids modern technology starting with a soldering iron making an LED blink, and building a PC from parts, and eventually compiling an operating system from source code. I see absolutely no reason for a kid to ever need unsupervised access to the internet until at least high school, and even then not on a phone, but via desktop computers in common areas where there is accountability.

Kids turn 18 eventually. Unless they’re homeschooled and kept in a compound away from peers with different experiences, I’m not sure how sustainable this approach is long-term.

I say this as the father of a 17-year-old who once read 200 books per semester in elementary school, winning school and city reading awards. This year in high school, she’s read maybe a couple of short stories at most. She’s grown up surrounded by bookshelves in every room, but now she has no inclination to even glance at the spines, much less open a book.

We read aloud together every night for years, usually books well beyond her grade level, which was already advanced. I exposed her early to Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and other great directors. Now her media diet is mostly TikTok and gaming YouTube videos. Musically, she’s remained open to everything from classical to oldies, fortunately. As for technology, despite learning quite a bit of Python and JavaScript starting at 10-11, she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.

Is this a teenage phase? Maybe. I’m hoping with everything I have that it is, and that the curiosity I modeled for her will resurface eventually. You can create the ideal environment, model the behavior you want, and do everything you can as a parent. But once kids develop autonomy and see what their peers are doing, they make their own choices. Sometimes those choices look nothing like what you hoped to cultivate.

Mate what were you hoping a kid would get out of Ingmar Bergman and Antiononi movies and Javascript? Imagine forcing a child to watch Red Desert lmao. And now you're writing off her curiosity because she's not interested in AI architecture or whatever. Let people develop their own interests jfc

I think you are confusing forced exposure to something with being exposed to something by choice. I did not force my daughter to watch Bergman and Antonioni; I was interested in their movies so I saw them, and she chose to be interested in what kept me interested. That is how we get our cultural knowledge passed down through generations of parents who do not simply consume whatever algorithmically generated media is served up to them. You are setting the problem: you have assumed that for children to be introduced to anything other than the popular culture among their peers is always oppressive. And when you narrowed my references to Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Antonioni down to "Red Desert," you showed either that you are being dishonest or that you really don't know what you're dismissing when you dismiss all of these directors and their works. Her access to everything included books, music, films from different genres and time periods, and she chose which things she wanted to pursue based on the options available to her. The fact that now she does not care about the architecture of artificial intelligence does not indicate that the exposure I provided to her earlier failed her, and this is precisely what I said could happen: teenagers are making their own choices, influenced by peer pressure and social forces, and that does not make the earlier exposure I gave her invalid or mean I should have given her an iPad at the age of 5 and called it autonomy. I’m not writing off her curiosity, which you would see had you read all the way to the end of my comment. Given your username, I am not surprised that you are weak in nuanced thinking regarding exposure versus coercion.

When a kid is old enough to pay for their own apartment and bills and has money left over for a smartphone, drugs, alcohol, or other poisons, that will be their choice to make.

Until then, they are not an independent adult, and it is absolutely the responsibility of a parent to keep them away from poison they are clearly not emotionally mature enough to regulate yet.

> she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.

Same answer. Most adults cannot moderate proprietary social media algorithms and AI tech so why would we expect a teen to?

When one permits kids to access to things literally purpose built to ensure humans think less, it should not be surprising when they think less.

Burn ChatGPT and Tiktok with fire. Every home would be better off banning things like these.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com