In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.

I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was intoxicating. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.

For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.

You could even argue that society is incapable of not running into these cycles of building wisdom and losing it. Our minds are differential.. things that are here have less value, we seek newness no matter what.

> rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors

This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.

I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.

We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)

I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.

I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.

Your Phone Isn't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659

Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here.

The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.

Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.

The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.

Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.

"What if coworker I disapproved of but society"

Article about smartphones being bad? Right to the top.

Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.

I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.

This criticism would be valid if the researchers had studied just one group of schools, and their methodology was just comparing before and after. But that's not all they did. They had two groups of schools, with low/high cell phone use before the ban. Their hypothesis was that the schools with high cell phone use would see a larger change in test scores (as they would have the largest drop in mobile phone usage).

  We then turn to our causal analysis comparing schools with different degrees of apparent pre-ban student cellphone use, after vs. before Florida’s cellphone ban. We show that the ban increased disciplinary incidents and suspensions significantly in the first year, immediately after the district started referring students for disciplinary action for cellphone use infractions. In particular, our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that the ban increased suspension rates by 12 percent (relative to the comparison group mean) and in-school suspension rates by roughly 20 percent in the first year.

This was controlled for in the study.

I swear sometimes people only exist to look for flaws in studies they didn't read.

> It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.

Why do you think that's more likely?

This is also very closely following the pandemic. I'd imagine that massively pollutes their data. I didn't see a comparison to comparable districts that didn't implement a ban.

Just from anecdata of my own kids, enforcement is nearly impossible. Phones are banned citywide as of this year but it sounds like they are still being used pretty openly.

In other words, correlation does not imply causation

I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons.

One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.

Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.

Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.

Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?

When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.

I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.

We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...

Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.

What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.

I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)

(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)

It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.

Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.

This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.

Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.

In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.

In our local schools, they don't make *teachers* responsible for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the administration will give also give additional consequences such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities like Prom.

My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.

If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.

A lot of schools implement this by having the students put their phones in a locked pouch when they enter the building in the morning. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch

This generally takes it out of the hands of individual classroom teachers.

iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.

For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed. I think younger people today will as well.

> I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P

Work from ... Texas?

Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.)

Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.

Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world.

> he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.

That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately.

> Teachers are inherently lazy.

I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.

There's no study that's good enough for HN.

I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.

Ok here is the crucial part of the paper:

It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:

> Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban took effect), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_t are the parameters of interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with the period before the ban serving as the omitted category, holding grade level constant.

To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm not an economist and could not do better.

To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2 percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.

The lack of control and cohort following are legitimate criticisms. The effect size is not. Even a single-digit percentage increase over a single year from policy treatment is incredibly impressive when we open the door to cumulative effects.

> Yet the data fits people's biases

It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen documented when it comes to teens and social media.

There is another major factor that could cause scores to rise globally: ChatGPT. It is now good enough that it can explain topics to students at home, like a private tutor.

I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:

1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.

2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.

3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.

You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.

It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.

It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.

I don't think you are being totally fair to the paper, but you do point out something that drives me crazy: local freakouts about year-to-year changes in math tests scores. It's like people don't realize that these 8th grade students are not the same as those.

Yea, it's strange that the line didn't move quickly. I would give grace for a couple weeks to a few months, but next year? The timing feels really disconnected.

I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.

I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).

I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written:

> Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels.

> Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect.

Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph.

But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.

When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over time.

There are of course bigger problems, but it seems like phones are one of those "attainable" problems for a school to fix.

Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.