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Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Having used a Palm Pilot to genuine benefit in highschool in the 90s, and having finally just gotten a smart watch in part specifically to reduce smartphone usage, I have mixed feelings about broad restrictions. Networked smart phones absolutely have major addictive and disruptive effects, and are hard to police in practice. But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits, while IME have lived up to my hopes of being high enough friction/miserable enough to use for browsing or the like that the effect is nothing like a phone. Putting it all in the same bucket feels overboard, though maybe is necessary in practice. But pendulums seem to often have a tendency to swing between extremes and I wish officials were willing to try more tailored measures before sledgehammers more often. Still I think the overall trend looks positive.

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> But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits

For kids? How ever did anyone survive before 1990.

>How ever did anyone survive before

I really, really hate this mindless, lazy line of argument in general. It gets tossed out with absolutely everything, from the internet to vaccines to modern farming. The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't". Life expectancies were in fact lower in the past. More people died, or were maimed, with no hope of treatment. Or sometimes it's "they did, but much less efficiently and we come to depend on each growth of the economy which at the foundation is literally about being able to do things more efficiently". Ease of communication, knowing what the weather is, all sorts of things mean less wasteful use of time and energy. Sometimes "they did, but perhaps less happily". A loved relative was in and accident, went to the hospital and you never got the chance to be involved when it mattered. And of course in some cases it's "new things have created downsides that create a need for other new things, the world has changed". Sometimes we can do something about that in the near term. Sometimes we cannot.

Low effort responses like you made are discouraged on HN for good reason. Yeah, absolutely new negatives have come with the new positives and seeking to reduce the former matters. But productive discussion and activity tends to focus on specifics vs generalities. Reducing the benefits of real time communication devices to a binary "life/death" and then NOT grappling with modern trends in everything from natural disasters to school shootings to reduced bussing doesn't strike me as great Walter.

I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it?

It's zero in my case.

Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.

If you still want it, put a landline phone in each classroom on the teacher's desk. The principal can also have a switch to turn it off in an emergency.

>I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it? It's zero in my case.

Yeah, there were no school shootings in my state in the 90s either. But since Columbine objective fact is there have been over 400 affecting almost 400k students [0], and the trend doesn't seem to be going down. Events like sudden wildfires going out of control in a real hurry are now also radically different then even 20 years ago. And yes, some of the scheduling and health features watches offer would have been very helpful to me in school thanks. The communication features of watches are pleasantly minimal and also almost necessarily public. They only work well 2-way with voice, which is not something one can do silently by definition and thus highly policeable in class. The information consumption capability is highly minimal. Watches also do not have cameras with all the associated issues. And it'd be possible to take the communication restrictions further with cellular restrictions in school and forcing everything through the school's firewall.

>Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.

Out of genuine curiosity: can you show me some good studies on this with respect to watches, not phones? On the smart phone side yes, I've absolutely both seen studies and personally experienced the addictive and distracting aspects. But I have not seen anything like that with watches, and my personal experience is also that it's completely different in usage.

I stand by my assertion: you threw out a form of argument that is lazy, shallow, and constantly misapplied. Even if in this specific case the balance of factors weighs against any smart devices at all (which I both extremely doubt and think will become extremely problematic for other reasons longer term), the form of argument "how did anyone survive before X" is so regularly bad faith, aggressively stupid, or both that it coming out instantly makes me more not less suspicious of whichever side the person stating it is supporting.

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0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-...

Why does a health monitor need to be in constant connection with the internet? If there's a problem, it can just beep at you.

Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.

For wildfire, call the principal who then hits the fire button. We had tornado drills in elementary school. No phones were required, it was a siren mounted on a pole. It worked fine.

Who needs 1000 phones in the school?

>Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.

A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.

That's a rare circumstance that is made to seem more common by very wide media coverage. And even in that sort of situation, it seems doubtful that it actually helps anybody either. Some parents will show up and get in the way of emergence responders. Most kids who call their parents will end up surviving anyway, and the phonecalls end up increasing the number of people who get PTSD from the whole thing. If a modest sized school of 500 kids has an above average shooting which kills 20, then you have 480+ parents getting a premature ""last call""; all would have been better off hearing about the incident after they already knew their kid was safe.

These kinds of calculations aren't useful to a typical US parent who, after the Uvalde disaster, has absolutely no reason to trust law enforcement to handle such a situation competently, and every reason to distrust them. Why should they assume that the cops in their town are any better than Uvalde's? They're going to hear "your kid can't have their phone in our school" and think of this.

Whether or not the cops in your town are shit, your kid having a cellphone doesn't help.

> A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.

I’ve had this scenario in training at work before deploying to certain global locations (Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia etc)

That it even crosses your mind suggests that the US is a country broken beyond repair.

See: "a button to turn off the jammer"

I don't understand, do you guys think the children's phones are being vaporized by the Phone Vaporizer 5000?

When people say "no phones in class" they don't mean kid's can't have phones. They mean they can't use their phone in class.

I think, probably, this rule does NOT apply during an active shooter. That's my guess. I would imagine the teacher isn't going to start enforcing that rule while under lockdown. What do you think?

> can you show me some good studies on this with respect to watches, not phones?

This is literally one and the same technology. Just a hardware client for some pre-defined social networks.

if you really want to optimize for a very-low-probability event, just don't live in a school district with cellphone bans

you'll trade for a near-guarantee that your kid will have some social anxiety or attention issues...but if you really want to make sure they have a phone available in the low-probability event of a school shooting, this is the tradeoff you will make

What exactly is the kid's phone going to do in the case of a school shooting? Does it unfold into a bullet-proof vest, or a gun, or something?

Speaking of bulletproof vests, wouldn't ensuring that Junior is wearing one be way more useful than a cellphone for seeing him home alive?

> The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't"

I would recommend rethinking the assertion that most kids in schools are going to die without a cellphone.

A 300-word answer isn't 20x more intelligent than a 15-word one. I think Walter said all that needs to be said, and more economically than you did.

Walter's comment could be applied exactly as well to an argument that there shouldn't be electricity in schools (after all, kids survived without electricity just fine for decades).

The talk is about having a client for tiktok but with ability to phone - on your Math lesson. When the phone used to have no tiktok the situation is tolerable even if the phone rings occationally.

Now the tiktok client successfully competes with teacher for kids' attention and some dumbheads are shouting - "Look, the tiktok client still can phone police/firefighters/parents! What else are you going to prohibit, maybe a paper?"

If 99.9% of what electricity was used for in a class for was a distraction, this might be a reasonable argument.

It's not, though. But I'd wager that 99.9% of cellphone use during class is.

Then they needed to make THAT argument. They did not, argument was lazy "it did not existed in the past, so" thing.

Maybe Walter thought you were smart enough to fill in the gaps and think for yourself. Guess he was wrong.

You mean, make my own entirely different argument? Passive aggressive dig is not an argument either.

No, what Walter wrote what what he wanted to say. However, since you agree with the conclusion, you will defend the argument even if it is not too good.

I guess he thought you were smart enough to not need everything spelled out for you. His mistake.

I've made the comment before that all the schools really need is a classroom, desks and chairs, a chalkboard, and a teacher. Pen & notepaper helps.

The rest is just useless fluff.

Note that Caltech was exactly that. A prof, a chalkboard, a lecture hall. I learned more in 2 weeks with that than a year of high school. I've suggested to college students that they'll learn better if they leave their laptops in the dorm. And I say this as a computer professional.

You need much more than that for a good education. While I do agree that smart devices are not necessary, you still need a lot of extra materials for most subjects. You need various kinds of maps for geography and history, you need many images of animals and plants for biology, you need teaching manuals for every subject, you need various books for literature to read poems and prose, you need various materials for arts and crafts. Not to mention when you get to advanced subjects you need a heck of a lot more, at least for practice.

Having many of these materials in a digital format on a smart device can help a lot in terms of cost and availability. It's not critical, and I very much understand the downsides of having an always-connected device that kids are used to play with, but it's also not at all 0 cost to go entirely to paper.

I'm sure your time in math classes at Caltech that were only chalkboard and notes was extremely productive. But some lectures require more materials (you can't have a good lecture on Alexander's conquests without a map of what he actually conquered), and a full education requires much more than lectures. You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.

> You need much more than that for a good education.

No, not really. At Caltech, about half had a textbook, but the textbook was not referred to during lecture, and what was taught tended to diverge from the textbook.

> maps

The prof would freehand the salient aspects of a map and any other drawings required.

> literature

I never took any literature classes, as I saw no value in them. Even so, I cannot see the utility of a textbook during class.

> You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.

I had to laugh. None of that was available in the 70s.

I drew circuits freehand on paper. OMG. There were labs available for students building circuits, where the rubber really met the road.

I was not majoring in EE, I just enjoyed the classes. But the EEs Caltech turned out were all first class engineers. Taught by lectures with a blackboard and chalk.

Quantum physics was taught the same way. Not even a textbook.

The engineering work I did on the 757 was pen and paper, with a calculator as a crutch.

The most damning evidence against all these materials is that there is zero evidence of any improvement in K-12 results in the last 50 years, and things just seem to be getting worse.

> you need teaching manuals for every subject

Only for teachers who don't know the material.

That "How ever did anyone survive before" answer means absolutely nothing. Yes, we survived the 1990s, if we didn't we wouldn't be there to talk about it, thank you Captain Obvious.

I know, I know, this is sarcasm, but where is the argument? If anything, it is a textbook example of the "appeal to tradition" fallacy. There are many good arguments against smartphones in classrooms, that one isn't. For the details, see xoa's answer.

To look at life expectancy, you need to normalize for the fact that numerous things have shifted dramatically in society. For instance smoking rates have completely plummeted relative to the past, to say nothing of the fact that up until the 90s you could generally smoke everywhere, even on airplanes! Then there have also been major changes in typical occupations, reductions in youth driving, and so on.

Given that life expectancy increases have been coming at a snail's pace, and on occasion reversing, I suspect if one normalized for these sort of non-medical shifts in society, we'd see that life expectancy is most likely decreasing, likely due to things like widespread obesity, mental illness, and other ailments which modern gadgets are significantly contributing to.

I mean, people have been surviving for far longer before electricity was discovered compared to after. What does that have to do with anything at all?

I guess we'll find out when cellphones are banned from class.

Sometimes people just died, or whatever.

You never used a pay phone as a kid?

I was born in 1955 in the UK and I almost never used a phone of any kind as a child.

I have a friend a bit younger than you born in rural ireland; when she was a child her phone number was 8.

I used the two cans and a string phone as a kid. Only one channel on TV!

I built an intercom from a kit when older, but it was useless as yelling worked better.

Good grief, he's not that old ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

Maybe mentally append a '/s' to the comment you replied to.

Amusingly, at Caltech the only phone in the dorm was a payphone down the hall. The only time I recall ever using it was to make flight reservations to visit my parents.

My first cellphone was in 1994 or so. It took many years before I was acclimated to using it, and didn't get an internet phone until 2015.

I was a very early adopter of computers, but pretty late with phones.

Public payphones? Going into a bakery or a post office or any shop and politely asking to place a call from their landline to mom&pop's, having their number memorised, possibly placing a reverse charged call? "you are here" public maps/carrying a paper map? Learning how to use a compass+map or just sun and stars? Eating home-cooked meals and walking/biking around a lot to go from A to B?

For better or worse, the world is both more of the same and very different from what it used to be. Direct comparisons are not really useful, and quips like "how did people drive without a gas gauge / survive without seatbelts" are missing a ton of context.

I was referring to phones in the classroom.

It was accepted as a fact that kids got lost or in trouble and needed help from strangers. Or that parents had no idea where they are.

> watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits

Fitbits let you “see calls, texts & smartphone app notifications on your wrist when your phone is nearby” [1]. It has all the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems of a smartphone.

[1] https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/products/smartwatches/sense...

Unless a fitbit has a convenient keyboard I've been missing for years, no, it does not remotely have all of the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems.

Probably 90% of what kids do on phones is consumption, not production.

Of social media. Not texts - and tbeir friends can't message them during school hours anyways.

Me and my wife were discussing this earlier, and we both agreed we missed the days of cellphones + PDAs. That era was so much less predatory to our time, and there’s something to be said about the mental separation between “fun text time” and a dedicated work device. It’s just a shame that given the current technological landscape the closest we have to PDAs are tablets, which are typically too large to pocket (and nonetheless an attractive option).

Man I miss PDAs. My dad worked for 3com so I had a palm since about when I learned to read.

I was early with smartphones because I thought they'd essentially be PDAs with a modem ("They're just working out the kinks.") Smartphones have to be the most disappointing thing that's happened to consumer computing.

It's kind of funny that with pervasive networking I miss having to be mindful and sync everything I wanted to take with me.

yeah let em have flip phones with T9 word and snake. those Nokias had the benefit of being invincible

Smartphones and tablets do come in all sizes :

https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Not...

I can sort of squint and see the logic in your argument but I'm not convinced that allowing smart devices in schools and especially during class hours has enough good to consider seriously.

I don't let my kids use a smart phone for entertainment. They use it sometimes for chatGPT and Google translate especially when they study but not beyond that and I intend to keep it that way till they're old enough (17 or so).

> But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits

I'm sure you can get an exception for a glucose monitor if you have diabetes.

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