Many of the same things can happen in sandbox style games. I think there is a tremendous potential for learning in such abstracted environments. What about something like Minecraft, but with abstracted molecules instead of blocks? Problems, like the ones around portraying how molecules inside a cell are constantly jostling against water molecules, could be solved in such environments using design. Many people who play well balanced games at a high level often seem to be learning something about strategy and tactics in particular rule systems. I suspect that there is something educationally valuable in a carefully chosen and implemented rule system.
Also perhaps, it's so much easier to exploit such mechanisms to merely addict people, that overwhelms any value to be gained.
However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making the mistake of starting with language as the centrepiece and explaining everything around it. Human music likely predates human speech by hundreds of thousands of years, and is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....
And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well-being, and opt for it rather than what is immediately fun and pleasing. Just like most of them will live on chocolate bars and crisps if let to do so. The burden falls on the parents, a burden they don't take.
I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. And while my country can prohibit certain products (food, etc.) from import and production within its own borders (e.g. genetically modified, chemically engineered to be consumed greedily), this can't be done with websites, because (a) it's technically impossible and (b) it 'contradicts freedom of speech'. I'll ask the reader to philosophise over (b), because neither the founding fathers of the US nor the pioneers of the french revolution, nor most of the libertarian, freedom-bringing revolutionists had a Facebook to tag their friends' faces.
(edit: I don't want to get into a debate over freedom of speech, and don't support any form of cencuring of it, tho I don't want freedom of speech at the cost of exploitation of generations and generations by some companies that use it as a shelter for themselves.)
Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat.
is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
I think there is something akin to this that can be found in games, and that there is something particularly positive that can be found in well constructed games.
> Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties.
As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us.
The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves.
It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today.
I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.
And I tried to stay neutral towards games on purpose - I have taught game design myself ;). Having said that, a lot of real-world attempts at gamification are pretty banal carrot/stick schemes.
> I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
You're an adult, I am too. We can realize: this is stealing my life. But a kid can't. And stolen days don't return. This is why I'm commenting: we'd rather raise better individuals than letting them do wtf they want and hoping they'll fix themselves later.
Just yesterday before this thread even started (I work as part-time cleaner) I was polishing a window. Through it I saw some children in a sitting room, one of who was literally standing centimeters away from a giant flat screen television. Glued to it.
I thought: "Fuck, they don't have a chance". Their attention spans will be torn to pieces like balls of wool by tiny kittens. Now multiply that effect with the Net + VR and you have an extraordinary psychological effect best compared to a drug.
I didn't have a television in my childhood. I read countless books, and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't have done any of the things I could reasonably consider inventive or innovative. They might not be world changing things, but they were mine and my life was better for doing so.
I was speaking to a friend who has children a few months ago. He was in the process of uploading photos of his family to Facebook. I asked him whether he considered what he was doing to be a moral act, since he is for practical purposes feeding his children's biometrics into a system that they personally have not, and could not, opt in to. He was poleaxed by the thought. He was about to say something along the lines of 'well everybody's doing this' but I could visibly see the thought struck him that "wow, that's actually a really bad line of reasoning I was about to make". Instead he agreed with me, uncomfortably, but he got it.
I don't know how you get millions of people to have that kind of realization. I do think parental responsibility has a huge role though. My parents got rid of the television in the 80s. It was the right thing to do.
See, my grandparents worried that the new technology that my parents grew up with would somehow make them dumber (growing up with radio, parents getting television); my parents' generation worried that the technology we grew up with would be bad for us (too much computer, too much gaming, too much Internet). The upcoming generation of parents will grow up wondering whether VR and AR is going to ruin their kids' chances.
Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There's a term for this worry - it's called 'Juvenoia':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc
http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-t...
Now, I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be had - it certainly should. I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
I know this is bandied about a lot, but is this actually proven? With the exception of drugs, all of those you mention have been within easy reach for me (actually, as a Dutchman, even softdrugs were just one step away if I'd wanted to). Yet I don't consider myself addicted to any of those.
Just like an alcohol drinker and an alcohol addict are different, an internet user and an internet addict are different too. Just because some or most are not addicts, we can't dismiss the addiction altogether.
" I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise."
That's a strong statement to make. Implying he's unable to raise children because he'd like to see evidence that the internet actually has a negative influence on children.
Recognizing potential dangers is a far cry from saying that there's a risk of "losing the century" because of easy access to technology and entertainment, and it strikes me as rather belittling to the younger generation.
Millennials and their children are still humans, after all, and are just as intelligent, motivated, and adaptable as every generation before them.
> I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Basically we're on the same page.
Here is proposition. I'll steelman the Conservative view and you tell me what you think. I promise not to claim vidya causes violence or D&D is a leading cause of Satanism.
My proposition is that television media has meaningfully worsened our society by making it dumber. This is an artifact of the medium itself, rather than an issue with any specific content on it. To explain what I mean by dumber I must elaborate.
The television is a unidirectional medium. It contains consensus on various intellectual issues of the day and gives a description of the world I'd call received opinion. There exists no meaningful difference between the advertising that tranches people into buying products and the non-advertising that tranches people into buying ideas. Most ideas that are bought are not presented as items to be sold, they are pictured as 'givens', obvious. Most lying is done by omission. Even were all information presented truthfully, we have a faux sense of sophistication about our awareness which is a problem. When you buy prepackaged meals at a store you are not in the makings of becoming a chef, and in that way you are not chewing over the ideas presented to you, you do no mental cognition. Your state is best described as, and feels like, a hypnotic trance.
One of the problems with this is that television creates a false sense of normalcy that has no objective basis. It asks the questions and provides the answers. All debate is rhetorical debate.
It's the cognitive equivalent of 'traffic shaping' that Quality of Service mechanisms do on routers. In a way that is a much bigger lie. This concept is very similar to Moldbug's Cathedral concept. The people who work for the Cathedral don't realize they represent a very narrow range of thought on the spectrum. Their opinions cannot plausibly be of their own manufacture because one arbitrary idea is held in common with another arbitrary idea and they all hold them.
The key to understanding this is very real and not at all abstract, is that millions of people have synchronized opinions on a range of issues without any other discernible cause other than the television (or radio). Why do populations of teenagers become anorexic after the introduction of television where they did not suffer before it? Synchronized opinion is always suspicious. It defies probability theory to think my grandmother and millions of others suddenly came to the conclusions for example, that gay marriage was a positive idea? Why do millions of conservatives think buying gold is a good idea? It is not that there is something wrong with gay marriage or buying gold. It's that there is no genuine thinking going on about about any of this. There many ways to hedge against inflation that don't involve buying gold. Why is gay marriage the morality tale of the age, and not, say, elder abuse in nursing care facilities.
Why do some things become 'issues' and not a myriad of others? How directed this is is up for debate, but what is not is that the selectivity and constraints of the medium have narrowed our perception of the world, and that has led to the thing that made us dumber: it stunted our native creativity and curiosity.
> Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There does exist a series of schools in Silicon Valley. The software engineers at Google and Facebook and other firms send their children to them, and they strictly contain no computing related devices. Instead it's schooling of the old fashioned sort, from the early 20th century.
It is possible that this is juvenoia as you suggested. But at least take into account those parents may understand something else about electronic media and its affects on brains. After all many of them study seriously human attention for a living.
The other thing I want to ask you is have you ever visited in your country what we call council estates in Europe? These are places which contain the poorer class of people in our society. I've been to many of these gray lifeless places and they all have many characteristics in common. Television is a major part of their lives and their shelves are bare of books. It is ubiquitous. In the past the working classes were much more socially and intellectually mobile. They read. They did things. Little evidence remains of that today, but it was so.
It is possible that television is like a slow poison that affects some classes more than others. You can't just say people you know are unaffected and therefore it does not matter, because it is possible you may be part of an advantaged group for which reasons may exist why they could be more immunized than most e.g. having challenging or interesting work to do. It's worth considering that all the problems I mentioned still exist without television in society but you might say the 'dose' determines whether it's medicine or poison. There is certainly a sense among many people that television has progressively gotten worse and watching old news broadcasts and documentaries it is hard not to see what they mean. I appreciate this isn't objective measurement, but comparing like with like, say James Burke's Connections with Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, the difference is obvious and the Cosmos reboot would be considered very good relative to its current competition.
Evidence for my claims could be a reduction in the number of inventions (excluding paper patents) per capita, reduced library visitations with respect to population changes, increasing numbers of younger people unable to read, evidence of decreased adventurousness or increased passiveness in the population, some metric for diminished curiosity/creativity over time. If those were mainly found wanting then I'll concede my error.
I'd be much more concerned about curiosity/creativity, than reduction in IQ or school test scores because creativity is really the key to much of what is good about human endeavor.
I'd also like to point out that you might not be able to spot the 'brain damage' so easily, since it's hard to come up with objective measures without a good control group. If it happened to most people then it's a new normal but that doesn't mean it had no effect.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1048109...
Provocative but not evidence. I did look up some twin studies but I can't find one with a clear vice/virtue environment study. Gwern is good at ferreting out this kind of information if you ask him.
Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.
One thing I will offer is that in my household growing up, television was positive because it was an experience that we shared as a family. We would watch TV shows together, talk about them together, laugh at them together, etc. In that sense, television brought outside viewpoints into our household and spurred conversation. I think that is one of the key factors that may differentiate between TV having good effects and TV having bad effects on different people.
In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
Thanks for reminding me of how important that was for me :)
By the way, on the limitation of television being a passive medium.... This reminds me of something I read back when I was a kid that was very profound for me. I can't recall exactly now, but I think it was in a Sierra On-Line catalogue where Roberta Williams said something about wanting her children to play adventure games rather than watch television as with adventure games, they had to be actively engaged rather than passive. This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games :)
What I'm arguing is against an analogue of this in tech. There is a certain period during which the exposure of a minor to technological devices should be governed by parents.
What do you think of adolescents which get recorded nude on chatrooms? Some of them commit suicide. What do you think of children victim to bullying online? What do you think of paedophiles tricking kids online? Isn't a parent responsible of protecting a minor from such abuses?
My general argument on this thread is that we should raise out children as good as we can. Protect them from danger that they cannot be conscious of. We can't certainly place burdens on adults, but we can try to raise adults that are not inept addicts with social deficiencies. And because most of the worlds population is tech-illiterate, it falls on governments to provide education and assistance to parents, just like they do so with health and education.
Most of the counter-arguments here has been strawmans, because while I'm mostly targeting children, I've been countered with arguments about adults.
I concur. But the internet exposure of kids is mostly not governed by parents. They either are alone with the connected device in their rooms, away from them, or with a mobile device out of their home. The best the parents can do is to educate the kids, but the public lacks the knowledge to effectively do so. They should be given the formation to be able to educate their children, and furthermore schools should educate minors on the use of tech.
"putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" will mostly lead to addiction if the parent is not there to teach the kid: this is harmful to you; not you think?
And I don't mean that in the sense of "the kids are fine with their heroin syringes", but in the sense "I can leave the cookie jar on the counter and it will still be there when I leave the room".
Thank you. I hope to meet or communicate with Mr Burke at some point soon, I know Dan Carlin had a podcast with him a little while back if you're interested in his new take on the world. Connections remains the high water mark for documentary making and it is worth reading the books. If you want to watch a documentary in a similar style I suggest The Ascent of Man.
> In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
I believe you, I am mainly thinking of the average 5 hours per day the average American (or European) spends in front of the television. The dose makes the poison!
> This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games
Yes, it is clear that videogaming can provide for a shared community and culture, most obviously the MMORPGS. This is not something television achieves, or if it does, it is rare, like fans of Mythbusters or Connections. In the present we are concerned with developing the foundations of the Net, like commerce or the law. But ultimately I think a Net culture will be the most valued feature we ascribe to the Net.