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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Phones have value. That’s why people use them

Now try the same line but with heroin, or fast food, or whatever people use to their detriment...

Besides, anything that has value also has an opportunity cost, which can be much more important than the value inherent in the thing...

>Here’s an example: I want to take public transport to a grocery store. I walk out the door. I don’t have my phone. First of all, if I don’t check the opening hours of the store before leaving, I now have no idea. The whole trip may be for nothing.

Yeah, it's a wonder how people managed to live and visit the grocery store in the dark ages of the 90s and early 00s... All these people going out of their homes at 02:00am only to find the grocery store closed...

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You’ve never got to a store only to realize they are closed on Mondays or something?

Yes, but I've never considered it important enough to say

"I'd better be saddled with a device that can be addictive, that I spend hours on end each day on, that everybody I known can harass me at any time, any where on, that keeps tabs on all kinds of things including my every movement

-- lest I repeat this visited-a-closed-store blunder...

I'm not saying that a smartphone is not immesely useful -- I use mine for notes, video, photos (including pro work), phonecalls (duh), messaging, and so on.

I'm saying that "gives us things like grocery store times or gps routes" (or many combinations of such things) is hardly an argument for smartphones as "indispensable", nor a reason not to consider their, often serious, downsides (behavioral, cognitive, social, privacy, etc)

If such an event has ruined your life, I wager that you have bigger or more systemic problems going on than not being able to buy a stick of butter from Cooper's Grocery on a particular day.

The capacity of being flexible is valuable. Yes, having the world in your pocket is valuable when something jumps up and goes "boo". However, most people should not need to Google-search "what do I do after 'boo'?" every single time.

Ruined my life? Of course not. Annoyed me? Yes. Having a product that enables me to avoid that annoyance is nice.

Considered the opportunity cost? Or would any annoyance justify any solution, whatever the downsides?

What opportunity cost? Why is it impossible for me to conclude that possessing a smartphone does not cause me any harm? There is a persistent rhetoric among online technologists that people are wrong for making different value judgements. Some people don't like that their phone stores a record of their movements. That's fine. But people who disagree can do so for reasons other than ignorance.

>But people who disagree can do so for reasons other than ignorance.

Yes, and here's the key: they might still be wrong.

I'm not saying this is the case. I'm saying that this is a possibility. "I took an informed decision which is not due to ignorance" doesn't mean the decision can't still be wrong.

Not to mention that most people just adopt shiny new stuff, hardly pausing to indeed make informed decisions...

> Yes, and here's the key: they might still be wrong.

I truly do not believe I am wrong for having a smartphone in my pocket when going to the store. I understand the structure and behavior of mobile apps and mobile operating systems far better than most.

> Not to mention that most people just adopt shiny new stuff, hardly pausing to indeed make informed decisions...

Now we are back at the ignorance claim! I've got a PhD in mobile security. I've been working in this space for more than a decade! I assure you I have done more than "hardly pausing".

People claimed that bicycles would cause the destruction of society when they were introduced. Can't I just declare that all of the skeptics are ignorant luddites using the same arguments you are?

>Now we are back at the ignorance claim! I've got a PhD in mobile security. I've been working in this space for more than a decade! I assure you I have done more than "hardly pausing".

That's technical knowledge though.

But there's another thing when it comes to ignorance or not, that's not tied to "how they work".

The understanding of their social/political/etc implications.

Someone who even designs smartphones is not necessarily savvy to the latter. If anything, his whole career gives them an incentive not to be ("it's difficult to make somebody understand something whose career depends on not understanding it").

>People claimed that bicycles would cause the destruction of society when they were introduced.

Well, they were not far off :-) Though that's more like a "people have been wrong about X in the past, so they can't be right about Y now".

Ok. Be specific then. Why should I leave my phone at home.

I left the house today, the store I intended to go to was closed. I went to another one.

Honestly if I'm with my child I frequently leave my phone at home. We can both concentrate on each other that way, and there's rarely anything more important than that. My wife has sometimes suggested I should take a phone with me one particular day, in case she wants to change (working) plans at the last minute, but otherwise we're happy without.

This is exactly the kind of absurd, completely surreal type of argumentation I’m talking about. You’re literally comparing a smartphone to one of the most dangerous and addictive opioids available, responsible for 15 000 overdose deaths annually in the US alone.

And in case you perhaps didn’t actually read my comment, I pointed out the fact that I was one of those people who visited grocery stores in the 90s, which is why I know that doing it today is easier than it was back then. That’s the whole point. Falling back on childish exaggeration like “oh I wonder how ANYONE managed to do this before” obviously doesn’t disprove the fact that what was possible before is now still possible but easier.

>This is exactly the kind of absurd, completely surreal type of argumentation I’m talking about. You’re literally comparing a smartphone to one of the most dangerous and addictive opioids available, responsible for 15 000 overdose deaths annually in the US alone.

You've missed the whole point. I'm answering the crap argument "Phones have value. That’s why people use them." - showing that people use things that don't have value (and can even be hamrful) all the time.

It's not about the relative danger of phone vs heroin. It's about "people use it, thus it has value" is a crap argument.

In fact, I also included fast food (which people don't overdose from), on my counter-argument, which you conveniently ignored.

>And in case you perhaps didn’t actually read my comment, I pointed out the fact that I was one of those people who visited grocery stores in the 90s, which is why I know that doing it today is easier than it was back then. That’s the whole point.

No, the whole point is that it's only marginally easier, to the point of hardly being worth it just for those kind of conveniences, while creating its own problems, which can have a much worse impact in one's life than "I missed the grocery store open times"...

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171130090041.h...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321...

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