Smart tech is not making us stupid, instead is cognitively beneficial | Hacker News Reader

Smart tech is not making us stupid, instead is cognitively beneficial

uc.edu

The intro of the actual paper* is ambivalent, rather than what the post title asserts.

"We critically examine relevant findings and argue that there is no clear evidence for detrimental lasting effects of digital technology on cognitive abilities."

*https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01162-0

"Technology may change cognition without necessarily harming it"

Change does not imply benefit or harm.

I'll give you a shave, without necessarily cutting your throat.

So is it a good shave or a bad shave?

Sounds like a close one either way. Too close.

“We didn’t find anything significant, here’s tasty phrasing that you can misinterpret and make sensational headline”

If you write a scientific publication you should really really aim to avoid stuff which can easily be misinterpreted by laypeople and opportunistic journalists/influencers. The audience for scientific material is now way closer to the average human with no reference for how to interpret this kind of shit.

Ease of misinterpretation is not the problem here. It's bad actors trying to make sensational headlines for views, just like so much other News.

Most people read the headlines and move on. It doesn't hardly matter the source.

Sorry, but upon further reflection, the whole premise of the title is nonsense. What even is technology!? You simply can't make a convincing title for this subject.

I'm not about to drop the cash to actually read this article (as you should suspect). I just know at this point anything I read on nature.com is trash.

I mean the title of the nature article is pretty much a summary of a null result, but it’s phrased in a way that is very easy to interpret as positive (or at least non-negative) wrt the effect of technology on cognition. Where I really doubt the popular interpretation of ‘cognition’ matches the scientific one. It probably ends up closer to ‘smartness’ or ‘effectiveness’ or just ‘good’.

One of the authors of the journal article is directly quoted in that UC story as saying technology makes us smarter. I'd be kind of surprised if there isn't something in that paper making the claim too. It looks like more of a review article than a study anyway.

Given a quick read of both articles, maybe that author should have said that computational technology maybe reduces cognitive load so we can focus on other stuff. No shit…

The implication of all this (partly from the shitty phrasing on the part of the authors) is that we’re better off not being forced to think about the things that technology trivializes. A bunch of research on physiological and cognitive or neurological adaptation (or whatever happens in the absence of a stimulus to adapt to ) would raise some proper questions about that implication.

To me the way they present this is irresponsible.

I agree but all of your words don’t fit into the title/limit :-)

PS: if someone have access to the pdf paper it would be great to share it!

That press blurb is one hell of a hack piece. For one, it confuses the human ("us") with the system (a human plus tech). That the latter can achieve more than the first is no surprise to anyone, and isn't the target of the paper nor the headline of the press blurb, but it is the only argument.

I'd grade it a D-

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