Disclosure: I worked on developing smartboard technology for students in my country.

Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...

On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?

There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.

I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.

From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.

We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.

If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.

The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.

How come the only person who can ever seem to find conclusive research of this is Haidt? He really must head and shoulders above the lazy people in this field.

The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done

Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?

From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.

[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...

That's why I'm excited about the new batch of PineNote devices, e-readers running Linux with a custom GNOME theme and a passive stylus.

And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.