Hacker News Reader

Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same thing, the outcome they're measuring is unrelated to the reason for the instituted change.

Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on road death toll.

I think the point is all the "kids are getting damaged by phone use" talking points. It's using the school bans as a useful study; we can see what happens to kids if they're not allowed to use phones here.

iirc a similar study on the Aussie age ban is finding similar results; basically no difference. Some kids benefit, others suffer.

Agree that a study on grades would be useful too

Wat? Why would there be a difference? It only takes an hour a day or less of social media with an algorithm designed to make you anxious to really affect your mental health, how would limiting available social media time to 8 hours help?

Why would anyone really benefit from just a few hours off their phones?

That's like saying not eating for a few hours makes up for eating 4000 calories at dinner.

maybe it's more like banning smoking - stopping a smoker for 8 hours a day would definitely positively impact their health, even if they find it incredibly annoying.

It could encourage face to face socialization during those hours, which could improve mental health.

Or it could make it worse, depending a lot on highly-specific details of the school and the student's personality. A lot of people really hated the social environment of the schools they were forced to attend as children, and carry the scars into adulthood. On the other hand, a lot of other people liked doing things with their friends at school and have fond memories of it.

Maybe there is a difference in phone addiction management if they are allowed to use it every 45 minutes and if they are forced to be abstinent for 7 hours straight.

I personally would've guessed many immediate positive effects just from a phone ban in school, TFA claims they have a measurement against that.

Isn't it the inverse? i.e we think it is bad for students to have phones in schools, but it might be a problem for the students if we ban them, so let's do the test ... yep, no problem for the students, so let's definitely ban them for educational reasons?

yeah, that makes sense. Be interesting to see how that study goes.

And ofc AI is busy messing all of this up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com