Cell Phone bans in schools have picked up steam in many states and countries. Florida has a statewide law banning them and Orlando in particular won't allow them to be used outside of class time either, which seems to be the best way.
This is one of those rare bi-partisan issues that doesn't seem to have many opponents other than inertia. Also, total bans seem to be more effective then partial bans (thus you don't need to constantly police what isn't allowed at all).
I’m so sympathetic to the “it’s the cell phones, stupid” thesis due to my anecdotal experiences that I struggle to entertain the data critiques of that thesis. I acknowledge and accept this flaw in my belief structure. It just seems so intuitively true that phones have changed everything for everyone - adults and kids, western or not. Again anecdotally, but adults are just as addicted and made crazy by phones as the teens!
One way I’ve noticed - when extended family get together - a time when different generations would interact - the phone has meant that teens (or children, whether with their own phone or their mom’s) remain cocooned in a bubble of their peers and their kid culture.
Maybe we did the same who kept our heads in a book, but I feel like I don’t my know my own niece partly for this reason.
She is in college now and has grasped something about phone etiquette (or rather, IRL etiquette, since phone etiquette used to mean, how you answered the phone and so forth - “the person who called must end the call!” - seems quaint now).
But you can kind of see the effort on her face.
It reminds me a little of a church I attended which catered heavily to kids, or rather to their parents. Except an army of parents had to volunteer, so it was kind of circular.
This was before the decline of church and there were 3 services - at each of which childcare or Sunday school or “kid church” was offered.
I remembered thinking, they could go their whole childhoods without hearing a sermon despite their family being regular churchgoers.
It's bad data all around. It's always hard to learn about low-frequency stuff, but this matter presents several special issues unique to its particular case.
This is like the "Macro-Sociology" analogy to Macro-Economics, trying to speculate about micro-foundations while only having giant aggregates to work with. Lots of other things have been changing a lot in the time that smartphones took over, so it's hard to know without looking closer than people will look.
I suspect that none of the data-critiques looks very deeply into the question of what the data says about whether there are any statistically significant differences between those girls who commit suicide and those who don't. If I'm wrong and someone out there knows a good study in this regard, please reply with a link.
I also strongly suspect that people can't and/or don't want to investigate the cases of young girl suicides closely enough to extract all the important measurable quantities about their lives in order to try to distinguish these cases from their otherwise seemingly similar coevals, and that doesn't even get into psychological matters that are practically impossible to measure.
There is the famous difference between mere Intelligence and Actionable Intelligence. But some intelligence is meta-actionable: it tells you that there is an issue worth investigating more closely and that the action is to collect more and with sharper resolution and scrutinize and analyze to try and figure out if there's any Actionable Intelligence still to be gleaned from the field after all.
Of course running the experiment to see if one's common-sense intuition about the smartphones is one way of doing more investigation, and if it seems to work on the trial population, then get busy with the actioning.
Switzerland shows a confederate state of smaller canton states, like smaller Singapore city states, more like Italy or pre-Bismarck Germany. Which evolved into nation states because of the empire building French, British, and Russian nation states.
Plus printing press standardization of language.
Gaza should be split into some 3-15 (odd number) cantons, each with local, limited autonomy.
It was good that South Sudan left Sudan, and would be better if it were split further into different tribal-nation states. Lebanon would likely do better split by tribal religions, Muslim, Christian, Druze. Informally, it already is.
Supermajority tribal areas, like Jewish Ghettos in Europe before, are higher trust areas but depend on local tolerance of differences, and accepted borders.
With ai and deepfakes coming, rather than tin soldiers and Nixon, we need more high trust organizations. But high trust in shared lies, false beliefs (like systemic racism), due to social signals and luxury beliefs, also fails.
Families, like friendships, are the natural limit on the state's power to impose tyrannical rule, because they foster the creation of support networks the state can't cut you out of. Combine these with a (local) society dominated by one culture and you get the best type of civilization -- high trust civilization.
That is why diversity is not a strength but a weakness. And it explains exactly why would-be tyrants are now flooding us with it on purpose.
West overlooks the possibility of American -style immigration + integration. (Or it was the American style before Republican's decided it was a good political issue). Empire is not the issue. The non-Italian Emperors were not less "Roman." It was failing to fulfil their "integrationist" to the Goths that led to Adrianople.
I am intuitively sympathetic to the Haidt/Rausch thesis but worry that they have spent too much time paging through crosstabs looking for a group that would fit that intuition, and eventually found one just because you typically can do so by looking at enough slices, in the manner of the classic "green jelly beans cause cancer" XKCD. I don't know how to solve this general problem-- you want to let people do at least some exploration of the data to see where it leads without pre-registering every hypothesis!-- but whenever we see an affected group sliced as narrowly as "teenage girls in the Anglosphere" I think we have to get suspicious.
Common sense is that if you are dealing with anything new which amplifies, accelerates, and intensifies social influences and pressures, then teenaged girls are obviously your canaries in the coal mine who are going to get hit hardest first. That's hardly mining the whole human population for the random green jellybean grouping.
I liked the Rausch/Haidt piece pretty well, although it was a little strange to me that they were focusing on female suicides when male suicides were ~3x more for any given category. Every time they showed a graph I kept thinking "How have people not been screaming about male suicide crises for the past few decades?!" I am glad people are starting to take notice of the overall suicide problem, but it is really surprising that people (including myself, but it isn't my realm of study) weren't aware of the male suicide issue, or if they were, that they were not promoting it as a crisis. Better late than never, I suppose.
Measures of character/measures of outcomes is a helpful distinction. Not only are we inundated with (highly curated) outcome signals - often from super-Dunbar social networks - raising the salience of particular outcomes, and distorting/overwhelming our comparison ability, but also:
1) Robin Hanson (as I undersand him) thinks we modern humans conflate our absolute wealth with our relative wealth, inflating our own sense of status; maybe this also works in reverse, where disappointed macro-economic expectations lead to a sense of lower relative wealth/status for individuals.
2) Outcome comparisons likely feed back to character comparisons, as feeling one's outcomes fall short may threaten one's character self-evaluation, leading to envy and anxiety
Cell Phone bans in schools have picked up steam in many states and countries. Florida has a statewide law banning them and Orlando in particular won't allow them to be used outside of class time either, which seems to be the best way.
This is one of those rare bi-partisan issues that doesn't seem to have many opponents other than inertia. Also, total bans seem to be more effective then partial bans (thus you don't need to constantly police what isn't allowed at all).
I’m so sympathetic to the “it’s the cell phones, stupid” thesis due to my anecdotal experiences that I struggle to entertain the data critiques of that thesis. I acknowledge and accept this flaw in my belief structure. It just seems so intuitively true that phones have changed everything for everyone - adults and kids, western or not. Again anecdotally, but adults are just as addicted and made crazy by phones as the teens!
One way I’ve noticed - when extended family get together - a time when different generations would interact - the phone has meant that teens (or children, whether with their own phone or their mom’s) remain cocooned in a bubble of their peers and their kid culture.
Maybe we did the same who kept our heads in a book, but I feel like I don’t my know my own niece partly for this reason.
She is in college now and has grasped something about phone etiquette (or rather, IRL etiquette, since phone etiquette used to mean, how you answered the phone and so forth - “the person who called must end the call!” - seems quaint now).
But you can kind of see the effort on her face.
It reminds me a little of a church I attended which catered heavily to kids, or rather to their parents. Except an army of parents had to volunteer, so it was kind of circular.
This was before the decline of church and there were 3 services - at each of which childcare or Sunday school or “kid church” was offered.
I remembered thinking, they could go their whole childhoods without hearing a sermon despite their family being regular churchgoers.
It's bad data all around. It's always hard to learn about low-frequency stuff, but this matter presents several special issues unique to its particular case.
This is like the "Macro-Sociology" analogy to Macro-Economics, trying to speculate about micro-foundations while only having giant aggregates to work with. Lots of other things have been changing a lot in the time that smartphones took over, so it's hard to know without looking closer than people will look.
I suspect that none of the data-critiques looks very deeply into the question of what the data says about whether there are any statistically significant differences between those girls who commit suicide and those who don't. If I'm wrong and someone out there knows a good study in this regard, please reply with a link.
I also strongly suspect that people can't and/or don't want to investigate the cases of young girl suicides closely enough to extract all the important measurable quantities about their lives in order to try to distinguish these cases from their otherwise seemingly similar coevals, and that doesn't even get into psychological matters that are practically impossible to measure.
There is the famous difference between mere Intelligence and Actionable Intelligence. But some intelligence is meta-actionable: it tells you that there is an issue worth investigating more closely and that the action is to collect more and with sharper resolution and scrutinize and analyze to try and figure out if there's any Actionable Intelligence still to be gleaned from the field after all.
Of course running the experiment to see if one's common-sense intuition about the smartphones is one way of doing more investigation, and if it seems to work on the trial population, then get busy with the actioning.
Switzerland shows a confederate state of smaller canton states, like smaller Singapore city states, more like Italy or pre-Bismarck Germany. Which evolved into nation states because of the empire building French, British, and Russian nation states.
Plus printing press standardization of language.
Gaza should be split into some 3-15 (odd number) cantons, each with local, limited autonomy.
It was good that South Sudan left Sudan, and would be better if it were split further into different tribal-nation states. Lebanon would likely do better split by tribal religions, Muslim, Christian, Druze. Informally, it already is.
Supermajority tribal areas, like Jewish Ghettos in Europe before, are higher trust areas but depend on local tolerance of differences, and accepted borders.
With ai and deepfakes coming, rather than tin soldiers and Nixon, we need more high trust organizations. But high trust in shared lies, false beliefs (like systemic racism), due to social signals and luxury beliefs, also fails.
Families, like friendships, are the natural limit on the state's power to impose tyrannical rule, because they foster the creation of support networks the state can't cut you out of. Combine these with a (local) society dominated by one culture and you get the best type of civilization -- high trust civilization.
That is why diversity is not a strength but a weakness. And it explains exactly why would-be tyrants are now flooding us with it on purpose.
West overlooks the possibility of American -style immigration + integration. (Or it was the American style before Republican's decided it was a good political issue). Empire is not the issue. The non-Italian Emperors were not less "Roman." It was failing to fulfil their "integrationist" to the Goths that led to Adrianople.
I am intuitively sympathetic to the Haidt/Rausch thesis but worry that they have spent too much time paging through crosstabs looking for a group that would fit that intuition, and eventually found one just because you typically can do so by looking at enough slices, in the manner of the classic "green jelly beans cause cancer" XKCD. I don't know how to solve this general problem-- you want to let people do at least some exploration of the data to see where it leads without pre-registering every hypothesis!-- but whenever we see an affected group sliced as narrowly as "teenage girls in the Anglosphere" I think we have to get suspicious.
Common sense is that if you are dealing with anything new which amplifies, accelerates, and intensifies social influences and pressures, then teenaged girls are obviously your canaries in the coal mine who are going to get hit hardest first. That's hardly mining the whole human population for the random green jellybean grouping.
I liked the Rausch/Haidt piece pretty well, although it was a little strange to me that they were focusing on female suicides when male suicides were ~3x more for any given category. Every time they showed a graph I kept thinking "How have people not been screaming about male suicide crises for the past few decades?!" I am glad people are starting to take notice of the overall suicide problem, but it is really surprising that people (including myself, but it isn't my realm of study) weren't aware of the male suicide issue, or if they were, that they were not promoting it as a crisis. Better late than never, I suppose.
Measures of character/measures of outcomes is a helpful distinction. Not only are we inundated with (highly curated) outcome signals - often from super-Dunbar social networks - raising the salience of particular outcomes, and distorting/overwhelming our comparison ability, but also:
1) Robin Hanson (as I undersand him) thinks we modern humans conflate our absolute wealth with our relative wealth, inflating our own sense of status; maybe this also works in reverse, where disappointed macro-economic expectations lead to a sense of lower relative wealth/status for individuals.
2) Outcome comparisons likely feed back to character comparisons, as feeling one's outcomes fall short may threaten one's character self-evaluation, leading to envy and anxiety