[ExI] The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

[efc at swisscows.email]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2024, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
> Sent: Wednesday, 13 March, 2024 6:18 AM
> To: Extropy Chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Cc: BillK <pharos at gmail.com>
> Subject: [ExI] The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
>
> The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood
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> For a little over a decade, we have been raising children in an environment that is hostile to human development. We need to change that now.
> By Jonathan Haidt      March 13, 2024,
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> BillK, a friend is trying to teach his daughter to drive.  She is in her mid 20s.  Having a very difficult time of it, so he hired a professional drivers education trainer to work with her one on one.  The trainer had some most interesting comments, a guy who has been doing this for a living for 36 years.  He commented that there was a sudden and mysterious change that happened over about 5 years.  He struggled to understand why his students came to him with so very little intuition for how a car works and how traffic works.  They had to be taught the basics, stuff that 20 years ago all of them just knew.  Now, a lot of students come in for first-time driver training when they are older, plenty of them in their 20s, whereas before they were almost all teenagers.
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> Any ideas about why drivers in training were suddenly clueless?
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> OK the trainer speculated that as soon as video games and phones came along, kids growing up being driven around by their parents stopped paying attention to how the driver was operating the car.  They had better things to do.  So... they reached driving age and had no idea what to do.
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Hello guys,

On the same theme I can also recommend the documentary The Social
Dilemma (2020).

Quite interesting, and since I do not own a smart phone it is also
fascinating for me to get a glimpse of how extreme smart phone users
live their lives. Never have I been so happy that I decided to dump mine
when I left the corporate IT world to start my own company.

I also believe that there are several factors underlying what we see
today, but I also do believe that smart phones and what ever people do
on them is a strong contributing factor.

Best regards, 
Daniel