To solve fertility, solve marriage. To solve marriage, solve dating. To solve dating, solve socializing. To solve socializing, plan parties
I would like to know more about the phenomenon of non-socialization. I believe that it is real, but I personally haven’t seen it. When I was in Austin, the UATX students were socializing. A lot of other people seemed to be socializing. In my Maryland neighborhood, the Orthodox Jews still socialize on Saturday afternoons.
Here is a story I missed, from last November.
Caldwell County is quickly becoming a hub for cutting-edge innovation, thanks to a bold new venture called Proto-Town, a campus designed to help hardware startups prototype, test, and scale technologies that tackle real-world challenges.
…Proto-Town aims to attract startups developing technologies that directly improve daily life, making air conditioning more affordable, water cleaner, and creating high-quality manufacturing jobs in the United States.
Lockhart is south of Austin and north of San Antonio.
In sum, it is fine to want to run a school that way [banning phones], but do not expect huge educational gains, if any. The evidence on this is accumulating, but many seem unable to accept the results. In any case it is not worthy of a major moral crusade.
Students using phones in school makes teachers feel disrespected. I am quite certain of that, even if the evidence about the educational benefit of phone bans is contested. If teachers’ feelings count, then as long as getting rid of phones at school doesn’t make things worse for students you can increase aggregate utility by banning them.
At UATX, I would like to see a reduction in the torrent of distinguished guest speakers. I would like to see stricter attendance requirements, and fewer events that take students away from classes. I could try to make a pedagogical argument for my point of view, but almost all of my students seemed to absorb the material regardless. If pressed, I would tell you that what really bothers me is that I feel disrespected when students miss class or when other valuable activities make work on my courses a low priority.
In fact, it now appears that culture did not replace genetics as the vehicle for human adaptation, nor did it put an end to humans’ biological fluidity over time. On the contrary, the paper in Nature, from a team at David Reich’s pioneering genetics lab led by Harvard’s Ali Akbari, shows how the movement of people and the rise of agriculture unleashed a surge of genetic changes.
…it looks like Europeans have been selected for higher IQ, higher educational attainment, and less schizophrenia and bipolar disorder over the last 10,000 years.
Related: YouTube with Dwarkesh Patel and David Reich. I find it interesting that polygenic scores seem to work better for educational attainment than for IQ. IQ has less measurement error, so it should be the other way around. My guess is that genes for other personality traits, such as conscientiousness, are doing the work.
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It's a strange thing where folks that are really good at something start imagining they're really good at anything. I've often found the same thing with extreme high net worth folks; they imagine that because they're rich, they're smart about everything. I've also noted the celebrity aspect; when someone gets major cred (Noah or Dwarkesh) on Substack or other internet site, the horde of other Substackers/internet-ers pile in with kudos, recommendations, and cites. Maybe it's a coattails thing.
Internet brilliance in one or more areas (Tyler C.) doesn't necessarily translate into brilliance into other areas. What exactly does Tyler C. have going on in the fields of child development or similar related fields where his opinion on phones in school is backed up with credible experience and/or research? If he's got credibility with a track record of child development studies, I'll be the first person listening. If he doesn't, why do people cite his opinion on the topic?
I've yet to see any downsides to banning cell phones in schools. What might those be?
Tyler can call us parents "moral crusaders" if he must for wanting phones out of the classroom. We've been called worse. But, please provide the upsides for allowing kids to text or whatever during the school day. I say this all as an actual parent of a k-12 student as opposed to some economist on the internet with literally no skin in the game.