Hacker News Reader

Are we certain punching ourselves in the face is causing the bruising? It's almost too obvious and therefore necessitates extra scrutiny.

"I understand you think the water is wet and the sky is blue – but what does wet mean? What does blue mean?"

Great questions for interesting philosophical and academic debate.

Silly questions for deciding how to, say, raise kids.

Way to totally miss the point.

How so?

Neither of your examples are inferring causation from correlation, they are just questions about how to define wet and blue.

Yes, but they're obvious things that could be dissected ad nauseam in the course of academic – as opposed to pragmatic – discourse.

Water is wet, sky is blue, obsessive social media use is bad. I understand this is HN and the Internet, and so niggling academic arguments are fun and all, but sometimes it's okay for the obvious to be uncontroversial.

For what it's worth, I'm with you. Worst case is we somehow dwindle phone usage and it turns out that that wasn't the issue -- hardly a tragedy. Even if it doesn't affect mood/mental health, the time savings alone will be worth something.

I'm glad I'm on the "right" "side" of "history"