Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?
The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.
So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?
Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.
Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.
But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.
And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.
(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)
Yes, and this dichotomy has been analyzed by political and economic theorists for centuries and everyone except autocrats and slave owners has agreed that the conditions surrounding the "work_output : labor_cost" jobs you describe are a huge miscarriage of justice and ought to be discarded with the past. Whether that is predicted to occur via bloody revolution or capitalist accelerationism is a matter of your particular economic and philosophical taste. But every ethical human being says we shouldn't treat people like that.
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
> This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told.
The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).
> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.
> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.
I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
Just the fuck you rich, I'm buying a football team for a laugh human beings. Not that Warren would necessarily buy a football team for laugh, but that "kind".
The issue isn't that billionaires aren't human, the problem very much is that billionaires are regular petty spiteful human beings with poor judgement, impulse control, odd beliefs and an the utter lack of checks and balances that can be disregarded when a human has a billion and more.
NotAllBillionaires, sure .. but it only takes a few to screw over millions of other humans on a whim.
Frankly, imho, billionaires shouldn't even exist. No one person can get that much wealth, that much power, that much influence, without losing their humanity, their decency. It's just not possible because the only way to accrue that much wealth is to do horrifically indecent things.
So, do I recognize what you're saying? Certainly. But I won't be shedding a tear of sympathy for them. I lose all sympathy for them when they step on the necks of everyday people to get where they are.
Succeeding at business does not alone make you a billionaire; that's a whole new level above "successful business owner". Most successful business owners are millionaires but not billionaires. As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Also, winning the lottery to the extent of becoming a billionaire is neither common (that's the understatement of the millennium) nor a business. It is a gamble, and a gamble millions of people lose every day because they refuse or fail to understand the sheer improbability of "getting the big one" and the sheer degree to which said gambles are stacked against the "player".
> As I said, no one becomes a billionaire without doing horrible things because said horrible things are exactly how you amass such a large amount of wealth amongst a single person.
Not exactly true.
Andrew Forrest became a billionaire via Fortescue Metals and leveraging development of vast iron ore fields for sale to China. Since then he's focused on renewable energy to reduce harmful emissions in resource mining. He has skated some questionable activities in a humane and considered way but he's far from scum of the earth.
Gina Rinehart became a billionaire by virtue of being born to a self made billionaire. Her father got there by mining Blue Asbestos and exporting lung disease across the planet, followed up by also exploiting iron ore fields (although decades prior to Forrest). Lang Hancock (the father of Rinehardt) was a person of questionable values, Gina is a terrible human being with scany regard for others.
The same Andrew Forrest whose company were found to have knowingly destroyed hundreds of local Australian aboriginal sacred sites in its mining operations? Also, he's a billionaire. He may not be "scum of the earth", and maybe he's tried to do better in his latter days, but he still got horrifically rich off of everyday workers' sweat, injuries, and hardships (mining is no joke).
Besides, this philanthropy is largely just token restitution, at best. No one needs to be that wealthy to live more than comfortable. If he really wanted to help the world, he would use enough of his wealth so as to no longer be a billionaire.
People vastly underestimate just how much a billion dollars is compared to a million dollars, or even 500 million dollars. He could literally give away 99% of his wealth and still "only" have 10 million dollars. And as of of 2023 he had 33 times that much.
No one needs to hog that much of the world's resources. It is neither just nor equitable.
Are you comfortable blaming individuals like Forrest for the destruction that global consumption of iron, copper, and renewables brings, or would you rather 'fess up to collective responsiblity?
The largest Copper resource in the US currently is on naive American sacred land, and the latest proposal for providing rare earth elements essntial for modern lifestyles would disrupt a river system that spans a land area similar in size to Texas.
Do you wish to blame Forrest for these things, or the end customers and their demands?
NB: I've things to attend to now, I'll be back in some hours if you've an interest in all this.
It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it. They are just as bad, if not worse.
Also, apologies, but I edited my above comment, and wasn't able to submit it before you replied.
And no worries. Good luck on your things. Honestly, I'm kinda done with this conversation, as interesting as it has been. It feels like it's run its course.
It's a pity you bailed, no drama - it's an area of long term interest to me and from the look of your comment you've never worked in mining, you've assumed Forrest never has, nor worked the land, and took an ankle deep search for "bad things about Forrest".
The interesting thing about Forrest is he grew up on Aboriginal land side by side with aboriginal people who themselves have deeply divided views about their past and their future - Forrest has gone well out of his way to provide jobs and education for native people and to sit down at length and discuss deeply contentious issues.
In a domain rife with trolley problems he's been considerably better than most, still with unavoidable warts, and hasn't blown up and destroyed anything on the order of that which Rio Tinto and US Gas companies have.
If you lack any on the ground local context and knowledge there's no shartage of bad press about Forrest, he gets no end of it from the likes of Gina Rhinehart, Clive Palmer, and other resource billionaires who despise him for turning much of his wealth to a greater good (an area of debate, of course) and suggesting that others do the same.
I've known both her and Forrest pretty much my entire life, her land is just to north of where Forrest is operating, she is dealing with many issues - some of which are touched upon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6Hmp9ndkI
( Mainly about Canada, but comes back to touch upon Jill's 50,000 year strong family art collection )
> It is our collective society's fault, yes, but the billionaires are the ones who exploit it.
I'd be interested in your suggestions for how to do better.
Bear in mind that if individual billionaires were not operating here then the demand for resources would still exist and would be met by corporations (eg: Rio Tinto) who would chew through the landscape just as you claim others do: https://antar.org.au/issues/cultural-heritage/the-destructio...
I mean Masa will make you a billionaire if you just have a shit business idea you’re enthusiastic enough about, no need to be a terrible person.
Compared to the amount of billionaires there are also relatively many lottery jackpots that will get you there if you just stick your winnings in an index fund.
Not to mention that there’s a decent amount of people who become billionaires by just working on relatively boring ”normal” business like real estate development, where some luck, good decisions and leveraging bank loans will get you there without having to be a slumlord or doing anything terrible.
> The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.
Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?
"but this time it's different" has also been a universal historical argument
>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.
Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.
Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.
Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)
Making bad decisions is only a net benefit if they can recover from them in time. Then it becomes a lesson and not an anchor. With addictive behaviors like drugs, nicotine included… making the early mistake ends up being a permanent mistake.
> This time might be different. But it's probably not.
And this is an appeal to tradition.
This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.
When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].
That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.
Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.
Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.
But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.
Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.
What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..
Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).
Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.
Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.
Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.
Just nitpicking your first sentence: prohibition broadly works, just in the US (at least) it breeds negative externalities that don't seem worth it in balance.
Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.
My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
>My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.
I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.
Driving on the farm is actually a lot different, you usually have no more than one or two other drivers, but there's no rules. You have to know where everybody is, know what they intend to do, and know whether or not they know where you are and if they can see you.
it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell
Many countries have the driving license at 16. In France it’s accompanied by a parent; in USA it’s the full driving license (I’ve learnt at 13 and never had an accident for 30 years). 16 is ok if you withstand peer pressure.
Insurance and actuarial science is some of the most data-drivenwork we have. It is incredibly hard to withstand peer pressure and there is not much wrong in admitting what the data has already proven.
Teachers are not good indicators of measuring 'benefits', as they are both the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body, they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be, and they are also grading the success - which all too often comes down to compliance.
That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.
How do you a double blind sutdy on smartphones? It seems to me that the group that would get smartphone would understand they’re the smartphone group, and the one without would know they don’t have one.
I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.
That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:
* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;
* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.
That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.
> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body
> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.
To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be
Some do. Are teachers the only ones?
> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.
I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.
> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?
My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.
You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.
