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My kids have grown up with screens, amidst all the screen time fear porn, and seem to be doing fine. My oldest is 10, he does well in school and likes to read paper books and does karate and dabbles with sports. And plays a metric ton of video games.

Maybe there will be all sorts of terrible long term effects that won’t manifest for years. But my kids are clearly doing much better than I did in every measurable way.

I grew up a neurotic mess in a broken home. My examples of fatherhood were 80s sitcoms. I’m just making it all up as I go along. Not going to fret about screens until I see a problem.

> And screen provide tiny amount and much much less complex information than the real world no matter how complicated software you run.

That may be true in general, but I think what matters is that a screen provides much larger, richer and more complex information and experience than just about any other individual object in the physical world. Nothing in nature (with the possible exception of faces) comes within an order of magnitude to the "experience density" of a smartphone running even relatively trivial software like a picture gallery or a scrollable list of songs. I wouldn't discount the impact of this on a brain of a 1-3 y.o. It's a superstimulus.

> That may be true in general, but I think what matters is that a screen provides much larger, richer and more complex information and experience than just about any other individual object in the physical world

Children pay attention to very small details. When they are looking at a plant with a spiderweb, they are looking at individual leaves, how the web connects to the plant, the spider, its movement, anything in the web, the colors, how it reacts to the wind, not to mention the 3d-ness of it all. Then they touch things and see how they react, training their fingers, hands, arms and rest of the body to make the exact movement they want, coordinating it with what the eyes see and what the skin feels.

A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison, and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

> A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison, and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

I think the reason they can learn to use it immediately is that it's super-simple to learn - tap and swipe, and not very many of those gestures at that. Phone interfaces now are designed to be used by /anyone/ - and that means keeping them simple enough that it can be learned quickly by a child.

> Children pay attention to very small details. (...)

They do. All your examples are correct, for the first few encounters. Then they bucket these things as "leaves", "spiderwebs", etc. and stop caring. Complex does not mean interesting (see also my parallel reply here: [0]).

> A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison

No, it isn't. Not only the photos in the gallery are likely to be complex, with each showing a slice of the real world, they're also likely to be varied - each one may show a completely different situation, scene, context. And they're unpredictable, surprising.

The one constant of the natural world is that what you see now is roughly the same as what you saw a second ago, or a minute ago. There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly[1]. Meanwhile, smartphones are those magic rectangles filled with varied, unpredictable, immediate reactions to input.

> and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

Kids are smart and much more persistent than adults at figuring things out, meanwhile UX designers are assuming users are drooling idiots and designing interfaces that are more trivial than those on Fischer Price toys. It's a perfect storm, so no surprise little kids figure smartphones out very quickly.

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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113029

[1] - Not being able to would be debilitating.

Not my experience at all with kids.

> There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly

Kids know very little about the world, so everything is new, amazing and umpredictable. Some rock or stairs to jump from, throwing a paper plane a thousand times, playing the sand building something for hours.

With pictures, at least when they are young, they usually want to see the same ones over and over again, and mostly of people they know, but I guess there are kids that like a bit more variety.

Nothing in nature (with the possible exception of faces) comes within an order of magnitude to the "experience density"

I got one of the first digital cameras of anyone that I knew. It was early enough that people were kind of shocked to see it.

One of the things that I noticed very early on is that JPG files that were generated from pictures outside were significantly larger than JPG files that were generated from pictures inside. At the time I took this to mean that the outdoor pictures were much less compressible because the level of detail in the natural world is much larger than anything indoors. It's a world of subtle details that we literally evolved to sense.

I just don't think looking at pictures on a screen can compare to the experience of physically going to places.

You are correct. Indoors have areas of solid color and near constant intensity, which compress very well in a wavelet basis.

Physical world may be a fractal of complexity, and nature doubly so, but one of the thing a human brain is good at - and arguably one of its most important function - is filtering all that out.

This is the reason I chose to write "experience density" and not "complexity" in my previous comment. A tree may be infinitely complex, and the first tree you see is profoundly interesting. But the tenth tree you see is just a tree. Soon after, you don't even notice them anymore, except in situations when you have a reason to care, or you see a tree that is very different from all the trees you usually see.

You're correct on the JPG size difference between indoor and outdoor shots. But just because something is too complex to compress well, doesn't mean it's interesting.

I understand what you are seeing and can see your point.

I think it brings up another point though. Does interesting have intrinsic value?

I believe the 20th century was a time period where the western world had to learn to live in a world with infinite sugar, fat and salt. Our nature is to gorge on these naturally rare resources when we find them.

I believe the 21st century will force humans to live in a world of infinite information. Again, our nature is to gorge ourselves on things we find interesting. Is watching YouTube videos you’re interested in any better than eating sugar? Time will tell but my initial reaction is that it is just as unhealthy.

For example, I love history. YouTube will happily feed me an infinite array of little factoids about history. I’ve seen so many that I will then see the same one come up on my feed again and think, “ooh that sounds interesting” and then I remember watching it previously and can’t remember a single thing about it. Was it really that interesting then? Or was I just wasting time mindlessly binge watching videos?

Nah, I don't think "interesting" has intrinsic value. The kind of "interesting" / "surprising" quality that I claim smartphones deliver better than anything in natural world, is a kind of cognitive equivalent to sugar. For the most of the history of our species, sugar was a good proxy for "nutritious", and in the same way, sensory input being interesting/surprising was a good proxy for "important for survival". Today, both sugar and interesting experiences are superstimuli - they tend to be found in most abundance in things of little value.

100% agree on the balance.

"Screen time use may have detrimental effects on children’s health and development" to me associates with having witnessed (too many times) parents hand their child a tablet with some simple game or a video in order to free themselves for a conversation or another activity, rather than a parent teaching their kid programming. I wonder whether it's not the 'screen' itself, but the type of activity normally accompanying it. (And the sacrificed of other required complex activities, like you mentioned)

Just like it's really challenging to bring a second language to the level of the mother tongue, and even then one mostly dreams in the native language (citation needed), I wonder if learning programming from young age will open one to a more "fluent" understanding.

> High levels of screen time in early childhood also appear to negatively impact academic and social outcomes in the long-term [9].

seems highly dubious when there is an entire economy that sprung out of people who were exposed to computers at an early age.

Why is it dubious? Dropping out of school and social awkwardness are not uncommon stereotypes among computer enthusiasts. Having these properties doesn’t necessarily correlate with negative economic outcomes…

I don't think it's controversial to suggest that the world of "computers" today doesn't look much like the 80s and 90s. Back then, the most child-friendly computing device one could hope to be exposed to was probably a speak-and-spell (or a fiendishly difficult NES cartridge). If the kids back then -- now tech workers -- wanted to mess around with a computer, it was more effortful to engage with and presented even greater challenge once one was actually comfortable with it.

I had the advantage of a few family members already involved with computers, but I remember learning about colour depth with some ridiculous dinosaur game, about bootdisks so I could play Commander Keen, and how not to install X-Wing (don't ask). The act of using the computer was inextricable from learning about how it worked, and that knowledge could be immediately reemployed in more interesting use. I know a west-coast-style guy who works in a brewery and lives for Ultimate Frisbee, but he also understands scripting better than any non-tech person I know because in his youth he was seriously into Diablo 2 and its bot scene.

Contrast this to the modern iPad. No edges to cut yourself on, no seams to pry up, no tacit understanding gained, and the big draw being the meta-TV of YouTube...

And, importantly, none of those early experiences you had were psychologically engineered to manipulate you into spending as much time on the screen as possible.

This is such a massively important point. Back when I was growing up (Apple ][ / 8086 PC) the software was basically written by one or two people.

Not entire teams of people scheming addictive manipulation with slot-machine payout rates tuned to precise dopamine chemistries and social networking pressures using models that have been tuned and proven to be frighteningly effective over two decades of experimentation.

I played a machine zone game, thankfully only lost about 60 bucks on that crap between me and my GF, and by then I became wise to what they were doing, and shocked on all the levels of manipulation they were using for what is essentially a nag game that strongly rewards bullying for those people that pay to win.

The history of these games goes back at least to the mid2000s (anyone remember Civony/Evony and "Come Play My Lord" Ads? Those are basically the same game as Machine Zone). They've been honing the various mechanisms (false advertising about what the game entails, grooming whale players, addictive gameplay) using mechanics from civilization, tamagochi, and whatever else works.

Children's mobile games show a shocking amount of manipulative mechanics for the "free with ads" tier which for 90% of people (you know, the ones that aren't rich) will be what they use.

Then again, this is the world they will be living in, so exposure to the manipulation may be good for them in limited doses, but "adult supervision" is more needed than ever.

Indeed, they were something better! They induced my spending as much time on the screen as possible, because the machine would do anything I could figure out how to tell it to do. Something as rule-laden and consequential (or so it seemed to single-digit-aged me) as the physical world itself, except I was allowed to do pretty much anything because no one understood what I was doing!

Modernity presents the superstimuli parent is referring to but removes all the interesting paths into the machine, the better to shear us. If the gameplay was reading O'Reilly books and the lootboxes were full of code snippets, it'd be one thing, but that's not what's happening.

Who are you talking about when you say “ an entire economy that sprung out of people who were exposed to computers at an early age”? I genuinely have no idea what economy you’re referring to. Certainly not software development, as the original computer programmers (the people that built the things that later inspired children when exposed to computers in the home) were exposed well before computers were small enough to be in the home. Do you mean influencers? Streamers? Neither of those are considered generally to be positive for the social development of children.

I’m assuming they’re referring to the people who grew up in the 80s and maybe even pre-internet 90s that then participated in the tech scene over the past 15 years. I also don’t they’re talking about kids now but rather then.

I don’t know if that’s true either. Exposure to computing in the 80s or pre-internet 90s as a child would be a small minority of households enjoying the existing tooling, manuals, guides, games, and interfaces built by innovators before their time. It makes no sense to argue an economy was built on these households in particular, especially when tech is so much more diverse than whatever minority of families were able to afford spending a ton of money on in-home computing devices in a set of time.

This is only a correlation. My interpretation would be that those children are suffering from neglect and eat more junk food.

- "Go watch TV" (don't bother me)

- "There is pizza in the freezer"

My guess would be, that their parents experienced the same lack of love in their childhood.

There is more research if one is willing to look.

There is [1] - a study where MRI was used to measure the myelination in young children's brains, comparing high screen time and low screen time kids. It was a small study and relied on self-reporting by parents, but there's a physically measurable affect.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/04/132071/screen-ti...