undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbccdee6mo ago0 comments

Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight.

Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens.

The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in preschool-aged children who spent more time on screens. It's still a stretch to make claims about the intelligence of teenagers based on the fact that babies who spend too much time on screens are, at age 3, less developed.

There's also a magnitude problem. Even if we assume smartphones do have some cognitive effect on teens, how can we know it's the only or largest one? You can't attribute anecdotes about kids being dumb to the presence of smartphones.

0 comments

mallowdram6mo ago

The loss of attention, the erosion of reading and math skills as of 2025 are quantified, not anecdotal.

You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity, imagination, learning all stem from free navigation and vicarious, trail and error path integration. It is deductive that devices that impair this impair learning. Learning is based on free exploration of space. Mammalian intelligence is way-finding that stitches together landmark and non-landmark space.

The idea you can't see a relationship between pre-school, three year-old impairment, short-form cyberbullying (in teens) and teen loss of learning, retention, attention-span, creativity, suggests you are the subject group. If you can't reason correlationally, than science is beyond your grasp. Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information, then make arbitrary statements.

That was the tip of the iceberg, that list.

Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility.

bccdeeOP6mo ago

Education has been under the axe for years. Declining test scores are more likely to be the product of No Child Left Behind than the iPhone.

> You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity

"Basic science" is something of an oxymoron here. Measuring creativity is anything but basic. You're appealing to intuition—an intuition I share to some extent, but not one that we can call scientific

> The idea you can't see a relationship between three year-old impairment and teen loss of learning

I can see how there might be a relationship. There also might not be: Some kids are late bloomers, and the children in this study hadn't even gone to preschool yet.

Where's the meta-analysis finding a causal link between smartphone use and impaired cognition in teens? If you want to talk about science, you can't extrapolate things like this based on how you figure they're probably working. Science is empirical.

> Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information

You're getting awfully aggressive¹ about this. Have you considered putting your phone down?

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98

mallowdram6mo ago

Science isn't simply empirical. There are five other stages to theoretic knowledge and your reasoning suggests you don't know how to discuss ideas scientifically. You exclude statements to make claims. I said, attention erosion AND test score decline. You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind, and picking one of the conditions. Yes there is a basic science of creativity (there is also a complex), we have indexes of creative erosion in the mid-20s.

When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Until then you are just spinning narratives.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsbccdee6mo ago0 comments

Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight.

0 comments

mallowdram6mo ago

The loss of attention, the erosion of reading and math skills as of 2025 are quantified, not anecdotal.

That was the tip of the iceberg, that list.

Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility.

bccdeeOP6mo ago

Education has been under the axe for years. Declining test scores are more likely to be the product of No Child Left Behind than the iPhone.

> You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity

> The idea you can't see a relationship between three year-old impairment and teen loss of learning

I can see how there might be a relationship. There also might not be: Some kids are late bloomers, and the children in this study hadn't even gone to preschool yet.

> Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information

You're getting awfully aggressive¹ about this. Have you considered putting your phone down?

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98

mallowdram6mo ago

When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Until then you are just spinning narratives.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse